


Exogenesis Symphony

by SpectralNyx



Category: Phan, Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: M/M, Phanfiction, Sexual Content, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-03-18 10:13:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 442,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3565871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpectralNyx/pseuds/SpectralNyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Many things can change in the course of a few years, but Dan Howell finds much more can occur in the span of a single evening when a fateful encounter wth the impossible hurtles his life into a new and startling direction that will take all of his willpower and strength to survive.<br/>Of all the possible transformations he thought his life could take he never expected the savage world he's suddenly thrust into and forced to make sense of all on his own. However, when Phil returns from a family holiday Dan must confront a greater threat and try to find a way to protect them both from the creature he's become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Petrichor

It begins in moderato, with Rachmaninov’s piano concerto. _Number two, C minor, Op.18_ , the thought drifts to him lazily and melts to the back of his mind. Stars flare hot above him in the wide open sky of the field where he lays prone on the soft earth with nothing but the soft call of the wind and the ghostly chords of a concerto gradually building in resonant tones from a piano he cannot see. The ground smells of ozone and damp, an electric peculiar scent which has a name- he knows this, what is it called? 

_Petrichor_ , the word comes to him like a drumbeat, _stones and the blood of the gods. Blood of the gods_. 

The last part nags at his thoughts with echoic overtures of importance, but he’s not sure why. Dew paints abstract pointillism designs of water along the strands of a cobweb hung between the swaying stalks of wildflowers next to his head and his eyes flicker between the constellated dots of the cobweb and those of the sky. The contrast between the two has an eerie quality to it; a fleeting beauty in the points of light captured in place for a moment in time before the sun dissolves both away. 

A copper tang rests heavy in his mouth and he tongues the soft ridge of his upper palette to seek out the taste where it hides, licking in slow distracted circles around his mouth and along his teeth until he can’t taste it anymore. He’s not sure what it is and at the same time he recognizes it instantly. It’s good and consuming and terrible, these thoughts occur to him without context; and frustrated at his inability to determine why, he opens his mouth to exhale in a low shuddering gasp. In the crisp Autumn chilled air his breath leaves ghostly trails of smoke that dissipate almost instantly ( _nothing lasts forever_ , a small unbidden voice whispers at the back of his mind) and he knows if he had a powerful enough telescope he might be able to see further still, far enough to where dense nebulas, cosmic nurseries, churn out more stars waiting their turn to swirl into frothing brilliance. Thousands of years later, when these stars finally throw their glare to earth and change the constellations in the sky he’s sure he won’t be there to see them. 

_Or you might be_ , the voice whispers again, _in some form you just might be_. 

There’s an acrid tinge to the breeze which rustles his hair and sends the tall dark grass around him into unsettled whispers. A magpie chatters out a shrill warning call but he can’t see it in the dark. The wind gathers itself into a hectic gust and sets the cobweb to shiver, displacing a small black spider which scuttles across the dew in its path to escape to more settled environs. A stench of smoke and burning wood overwhelms the scent of petrichor with an intrusion that chokes the air and grates the back of his throat. It incites a feeling of déjà vu, of a threat he can’t see but should recognize and once more he struggles to remember.  
_This is important_ , he thinks, _why can’t I remember?_  
Now he can hear the crackle of fire in his ears and above him the stars suddenly overtake the dark sky in rogalian shapes too close for comfort in apocalyptic hues of bright orange and red and with a start he finally remembers. 

At the same time, he realizes it’s too late. 

The piano concerto, once a background whisper of sound in his awareness, roars into fortissimo, overwhelming him with its energy and sound. As if bidden by the music small tongues of flame waver up from the ground where there was once grass, burning across his fingertips and around his body in a shimmering pyre he’s unable to escape. Above him he can see the flames reflected until the sky and the ground are too mirrored to distinguish between them. He turns his head with a calm that belies how panicked he really feels and closes his eyes. _Move, run, escape_ , his instincts toll out in repetitive alarms, but the magnitude of inevitability holds his limbs in place where he lies. Behind his shut eyelids he can still make out the wavering shadows of firelight dancing close to his face and before it consumes him, in the distance, over the thunderous crescendo of flames, music and a magpie’s call, he hears someone speak his name.

“Dan?”

The lump under the black and grey patterned bedcovers of Dan’s bed moves a fraction of an inch, just enough to signify that yes, there is organic life under the sheets despite the absence of a response. Phil looks on from the doorway and tries again.

“Dan, your alarm went off an hour ago.”

The bedcovers move with slightly more enthusiasm, but after a moment of fitful tossing and indignant grunting they settle once more into a misshapen lump which doesn’t exactly encourage Phil to Dan’s wakefulness.

“I’m leaving in a bit. You said you wanted to be up early because you’re meeting up with Louise, remember?”

“Balls,” is the low grumbled response as Dan’s head finally emerges from the covers. He offers a scrunched face of skepticism to his bedside clock and groggily registers the time before turning over onto his back to look at Phil with an expression of tired dismay. The fragments of the dream still pull at him, worrying at his consciousness with a message that’s already fading as he strains for better clarity of it. He wants to write it down, but dreams are better recalled when examined without interruption upon first waking and already Phil’s voice starts to erase most of the pertinent details he struggles to retain as they slip away in ephemeral thoughts that are more like sensations now than proper images. Between the effort of trying to recall the dream, focusing on Phil and realizing he’s woken up later than he intended, he’s altogether ready to just turn over and fall back to sleep again and try to reset himself to a Dan more agreeable to being awake than he is right now.

“Are you alright?” Phil looks him over warily as Dan merely stares back bleary eyed.

“Not sure yet. Give me a few minutes to settle back into existence, digest something and maybe?”

“I’ll be getting breakfast ready. Waffles you think?”

Dan nods and slowly hauls himself up onto his elbows so Phil doesn’t have to address what he assumes must look like a reanimated corpse. For his part Phil looks fresh and bright eyed behind his black rimmed glasses despite having gone to bed once again at nearly four in the morning. As an incorrigible night owl Dan appreciates when Phil can endure long evenings awake so they can record or relax into the early morning hours, but when he had the nerve to be awake at ‘reasonable hours’ the next day Dan is just left with the overwhelming urge to throw a pillow at his face. 

“When are you leaving,” he manages to ask around a wide mouthed yawn.

“Soon. I’m still packing up.”

“It’s only three days with your family, I don’t think you need to bring that much with you.”

“I know. I just left everything for the last minute.” Phil looks off to the side and sighs in half-hearted exasperation. “I’m probably going to get there and realize I left behind something important again.”

Dan would try his hand at a teasing remark about Phil’s less than exemplar packing habits but he’s too tired to think of one that wouldn’t fall flat and realizes it’s not as if his attempts at packing are any better. “Even if you do leave anything behind it’s not like it would matter much. You’re hardly leaving the country-well; then again it is the North so I guess for some people that’s debatable.”

“Funny.” Phil quirks his eyebrows up and gestures at the tangle of bedcovers crowding Dan in the bed. “Are you getting up then?”

Dan passes one hand over his face, up to his bedraggled hair and nods, trying his best to stifle another yawn before it escapes. “Sure, sure, be around in a minute.”

Phil heads back down the hall towards the kitchen singing a tune under his breath that Dan recognizes as the lyrics to Muse’s Sunburn when he listens closer. After a moment the sounds of clinking bowls, running water and the brisk snap of cupboard doors closing punctuate Phil’s song, filling the flat with the small comfortable sounds of domesticity and conviviality. On the heels of this mundane welcoming reprise true awareness begins to seep back to Dan’s mind. He still lingers at the edge of sleep, but no longer has an urge to curl back in on himself and burrow under the sheets again. 

The dream continues to batter at his mind on the edge of his periphery, blurring out of focus every time he strives for clarity. He’s kept note of most of his dreams over the past, but is wary of putting more stock in them than might otherwise be healthy. Dreams by their very nature were murky and inconstant, a liminal state of awareness where every small gesture and unassuming object could be a symbol portending a greater purpose or idea, giving light to occluded dilemmas he’s blocked to the back of his mind. Other times he’ll awaken with the distinct impression that whatever goes on in his head at night is no better than a strange art house film where nothing makes sense and a cigar is just a cigar after all. The dream, whatever it was, has left his stomach feeling twisted and sour. He thinks it best to give up remembering it as a bad job all around and turns his mind instead to the events of the day. As he does, any lingering interest in the dream is banished completely under the weight of realizing where he promised to be today. 

“Oh crap,” he blurts out as he gives a proper look at the clock and dashes out of bed at a mad scramble to wash up, nearly tripping over yesterday’s discarded jumble of clothing as he goes.

In the bath, the showerhead delivers a spray of refreshing warm water that carries away any dregs of last night’s fitful visions down the drain. The ghostly strain of a piano comes to mind but it’s too garbled for him to make sense of what it is or where it’s from. _Not Einaudi or Chopin_ , he thinks and is too tired to analyze it any further. He tosses his head under the spray to clear his mind completely and takes in a slow breath.

Lately, as their work load and pressure of content creation has increased, it’s more difficult to relax without constantly meditating on ideas for videos, looming deadlines and any of the other ways he would like his career to expand beyond the bounds of his internet produced world. There are many things he would like to do, people and places he would like to see, that have little to do with his presence on youtube. Occasionally these goals seem about as indistinct and elusive as the dream he’s now forgotten. It’s a consequence he assumes of having too much on his plate and trying to micromanage all the myriad ways he wants their success to elevate them to new areas of potential. Today however, the only plan he has in mind to accomplish is to meet with old friends and have a free day off from the pull of the world in his internet browser, although he knows he’ll presently return to it within hours of the reunion’s end.

He spends a few more moments delaying his emergence into the outside world until the spray of the water begins an an eventual turn from warm to cool and he turns it off quickly before it can become an artic spray on his head. 

As he towels down he can already smell the waffles heating up, only as fresh as the freezer packaged variety they bought last week, their time cut too short to put real effort into making anything from scratch as they otherwise might when they had time to spare. They’re both set for rendezvous at different times with different people, only Dan will return back to an empty flat he’ll have to fill with ambient noise and cooked food all on his own in between editing, booking appointments and biding his time with music and movies. It’s only par for the course as they can’t be always attached to the hip as other people might like to think they are. They both had families and friends apart from each other, but a part of him doesn’t relish the idea of being alone for an extended period of time. It’s not exactly jealousy or a sense of inadequacy, rather, it’s an intrinsic need, a lazy pleasure, to have the flat immersed in the secure presence of a beloved friend he trusts and feels comfortable around. 

He’s spoiled in a way, he thinks as he pulls on an ensemble of black clothing and dries his hair into shapes that don’t lie flat enough for his tastes. It’s rare and strange how far they both have come as friends and professionals and although it’s merely the result of hard work they’ve both dedicated over the years it seems to have all happened overnight so one day he woke up and could hardly believe the point he was at in his life. He’s interested to see their paths develop further, but for now, the only thing he’s interested to see is the real shape of food he can devour without thinking. The smells wafting from the kitchen have him on an autopilot course down the hall to where Phil is preparing plates and already sipping from a mug of coffee.

“It’s alive!” Phil beams at him from over the rim of his mug and it’s like bright morning sun peering through his window with a blinding intensity. Dan rolls his eyes in response and does a shuffling, groaning imitation of a zombie as he reaches for the steaming mug in Phil’s hand which Phil quickly holds up to the side out of reach. 

“I would have made you one already, but I didn’t want it to get cold until you got out. And I’m also watching the eggs.” Phil gestures to the stove where a pot of water set to simmer holds two eggs he means to hardboil.

Dan rubs his hands together at the sight. “Ah, yes, chicken fe-“

“Don’t.”

Phil goes back to watching the pot boil on the stove while Dan waits in reluctant impatience as the smells of food not yet cooked to readiness makes his mouth water.

He wonders briefly about doing a video dedicated solely to reviewing his favorite foods like a mock version of a food critic show or maybe a play on Anthony Bourdain’s dry wit and commentary, where he can visit different restaurants throughout London and have his fill of the city’s culinary fare overlaid with observations of culture, people and life in general- a clever guise for being able to just eat the things he likes in a one day foodie spree which would leave him feeling guilty but selfishly pleased at the end of it all. 

_Gourmet London with Dan Howell: this episode, Malteasers and Ribena_ , Dan thinks and then snorts laughter.

“What?” Phil looks up from the stove quizzically.

“Nothing, just thinking about doing a video where I review food or restaurants I like in the city and how terrible that idea might actually be.”

“It’s not exactly terrible, although if I did one it would probably just be me in the aisles of Tesco talking about Haribo, cereal and coffee. A December version with me reviewing Christmas drinks might be quite nice though. Maybe we should do one anyway.”

“No,” Dan waves away Phil’s enthusiasm although he’s tempted to jump right on board with the idea and try. “It sounds alright in theory, but I can only imagine how many ways that would go wrong and anyway we have the gaming channel to fine-tune without worrying about a new culinary segment. Let’s just stick to our occasional ventures with Delia Smith recipes for now.” 

Dan goes over to the kettle to prepare himself a hot cup of coffee while he waits for Phil to pull the rest of the breakfast together. On the counter Dan sees a setting of plates and silverware laid out for both of them. Two ramekins are filled with freshly rinsed blueberries and strawberries meant as toppings for their waffles and next to them are a jar of preserves and syrup. It’s not the most wholesome of meals, Dan reflects, but he sees this as a small treat before Phil returns and they resume their runs through the park in an attempt to adhere to a semblance of commitment to their fitness goals.

He feigns nonchalantly going about grabbing milk from the fridge and watches Phil out of the corner of his eye, Phil who appears to be affection and light made corporeal in a lithe six foot two frame sporting a perfectly layered fringe that’s giving him such acute twinges of envy he reaches up self-consciously to pat the edges of his own fringe into place. It’s the silliest thing in the world he thinks how the small details of who Phil is can leave him nearly as star struck as he felt when they first met, offline, like now when he’s staring with side eyed fondness at Phil like he’s just witnessed the birth of the universe and not just watching him carefully tap an eggshell open with a spoon as he tries to pick the pieces of shell from the soft interior while making noises of dismay when he ends up peeling out bits of egg in the process. 

At times Phil appears like an impossible creature with a puckish nature that is never spiteful in its manifestations. Dan likes to joke that maybe something of his family’s involvement with witches and the supernatural, a kind of old English magic, rubbed off somewhere along the line so that Phil was born half fey and half mortal, towing the line between two states so that all who meet him are left with the impression of having encountered someone different in ways they can’t quite pinpoint except perhaps to use adjectives like ‘weird’ or ‘strange’ which Dan concedes in some instances might be reasonable, but are hardly accurate modifiers for all of who Phil is. 

It’s ironic when he thinks about the way they met- two people with the same interests in creating videos, coming together to find themselves at similar height and easy temperaments conducive to the other’s company; going on to reside in the same flat they would eventually call their home while making a career and a life together. It’s enough for him to wonder how many times, realistically, it ever occurred that synchronicity could be such a tangible force as to unite two souls so perfectly. 

It leaves him with the distinct sensation that Phil isn’t strictly real. He possesses a singular energy always at odds with the heavy solemnity the world sometimes adopts. Not even his penchant for watching horror films in the stillness of dark rooms makes Phil’s demeanor any less welcoming. It reminds Dan to not take himself or the world at large so seriously even on the days when he’s tempted to do nothing but that. Phil is a reminder, a protection against brusque pains and worry, an enduring monument to the inner child in everyone that the world sometimes beats back to the point of forgetting it was ever there to begin with. When that part of him wants to hide away, Phil draws it back out effortlessly, with a sincerity and mirth which remains constant in a world that is anything but. Dan’s not sure how to express his gratitude appropriately, with all the meaning he wants to impart, but he thinks maybe this is enough, this moment of them sharing breakfast together in the small confines of their kitchen, shoulders touching as they pass on their way for a mug or milk, fingers brushing casually as they hand each other a plate and fork to share their meals together, this silent accord between them which says, _'I am comfortable with you, I want to share the space of my life with you because this here is enough for me and I love how it is enough for you too_ ', maybe that was better than any thank you he could ever say. 

As he’s pouring the water for coffee, his attentions on the mug in front of him, something soft tickles the back of his neck and he only has time to register the brush of Phil’s hair when suddenly Phil presses his mouth to the side of his throat, lips flush against his skin, and makes a sonorous purring sound that sets off a ripple effect of goose bumps rushing down his arms. It’s shocking enough for him to jolt to the side with a loud laugh while desperately trying to shield his neck from another assault by tucking his head towards his shoulder. 

Phil’s warning shout comes too late for him to notice the precarious angle at which he’s holding the kettle in his hand before a cascade of steaming water sloshes out and overtakes the counter in a spreading puddle that waterfalls to the floor. 

“Well, there you go, this is your fault entirely. Now you clean it up.”

“You were the one holding the kettle!” Phil laughs as he snatches a dish towel up to soak up the mess before it can spread any further.

“Wha-you were the one playing at being a cat into my freaking neck!”

Phil looks over his shoulder and gives him a tilted smirk, a bit of his tongue peeking out from between his teeth in a way which says, “ _yes, I know, I know exactly what I did and what it does to you_ ,” and Dan has to look away quickly to keep from revealing the heated blush creeping up the side of his face. There are variations of innocence to Phil’s demeanor where at times what he says doesn’t always catch up to what he might actually mean to say in his head, but Dan is aware there’s a deliberate cunning lurking just underneath that many times before has managed to utterly devastate him with laughter or a curious mix of love and desire that leaves Dan consternated and unable to look him directly in the eye. Phil notices the scarlet tinge to his jaw and laughs, which makes Dan snatch up a piece of his waffle and bite into it in the hopes that maybe busying himself with food will save a shred of his dignity.

They head to the lounge, balancing their plates and mugs on their laps as they sit side by side on the sofa and turn on the t.v, the rest of their time together spent making small talk about their meal and plans for the days ahead over the tense dialouge of Shinichi and Migi battling another parasite enemy. Finally, when they’ve chased the last rill of syrup and blueberry across their plates and cleaned them in the sink (Dan reaching over Phil’s head to close the cupboard doors left ajar) they begin to ready for their departure.

“Your phone,” Phil hands him the mobile from its charger stand in the lounge and Dan in turn hands him a pair of socks he found in the hallway.

“Oh sorry.”

“I feel like between me losing socks and you leaving them around the flat we should start a kind of tag and release program so we can always find them again.”

“Hmm, we could have sock updates,” Phil holds up one sock for emphasis and waves it around, “‘the paisley patterned left sock is currently walled up behind the sofa today.’”

“’Dan’s one of many black socks is currently suffocating in the laundry pile he hasn’t sorted out yet.’ And won’t until next month probably. Not exactly riveting news now that I think about it,” Dan says and wonders if in the three days that Phil is gone he should attempt making a dent in the mess which is slowly encompassing the entirety of his room like a slow moving toxic spill. “You have everything then?” He looks over at Phil who’s putting on his silver space age jacket while prodding the suitcase with his foot to keep it from falling over from where he’s tucked it by the entrance to the lounge. 

“I think so. Are you leaving soon?”

“Right after you probably.”

Phil pauses in adjusting his jacket and looks him over with quiet concern. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright? You still look a bit peaky from when I woke you up.”

“Ugh, do I?” Dan frowns and wants to take a look in the mirror, but at the same time he really doesn’t want to confirm Phil’s assessment and have to worry over it for the rest of the day. “It’s probably just a dream I had this morning.”

“What about?”

“I don’t remember anymore,” Dan says and flops onto the sofa crease, trying to think, “something about a spider or stars in a cobweb?”

“Tragic flashbacks to Charlotte’s Web?” 

Dan gives him an exasperated stare at the suggestion and Phil laughs again causing Dan’s heart to contract and expand like the pressure wave of an explosion, a burgeoning sense of warm affection which keeps the enigmatic threat of his dream at bay. There’s a sickening feeling of dread that wells up in him when he tries to remember, as if there’s a looming danger he should recognize and avoid, but it’s only a dream and he’s much more interested in the way Phil walks over and leans down next to where he’s sat on the sofa, and he can’t help but to notice the way Phil smells of sweet things, of the spice of cologne and fresh soap and he’s close enough to turn his head and brush Dan’s cheek as if he means to whisper a secret or plant a kiss.

“Almost forgot my phone.” Phil straightens up with the mobile he’s retrieved from the seat cushions unaware of how Dan clears his throat and tries to look very interested in browsing through a text from Louise he might otherwise overlook as Phil turns and makes for the door.

“I’ll text you later tonight,” he says, suitcase handle in one hand and an umbrella in the other, ready to brave the crowded underground and the rain-burdened London weather waiting outside their flat. Dan wonders what new tales of odd encounters he'll return with as Phil's distinctive personality seems to attract strange circumstances and people by virtue of being nothing less than who he is.

“Alright, see you, space cowboy,” Dan replies, not looking up from his phone but waving goodbye with one hand. He can’t see Phil’s look from where he’s texting Louise back, but he can feel it, that magnetic pull of someone waiting and looking in his direction with a singular intent which tries to force him to glance up and notice, but he refuses in a small rebellion that he knows means absolutely nothing.

Phil shrugs it off and opts instead for a cheery, ‘gooood bye!” and he’s down the stairs and out the door and all at once the flat is too suffocating with silence.  
Dan takes enough time to endure the unsettling quiet as he finishes up his texted reply without really paying attention to what he’s writing until he hits send and pockets the phone to look for his jacket and beat his own hasty retreat. On his way out the door a small wadded bundle trips him up and he looks down to see the same pair of socks he’d handed Phil earlier have somehow migrated back into the hallway. He sighs in forbearance and decides to leave them there until Phil comes back. It’s a signpost, a benign placeholder for Phil’s presence that Dan’s more than willing to tolerate simply because it's Phil. If love, in all its manifestations, whittled down to one empiric value, meant putting up with the small things, and he knows Phil deals with his own fair share of annoying idiosyncrasies, then what they have is just as good as that and if asked to explain it he never would, content in the knowledge that their shared understanding of one another was more than enough.

As soon as he opens the door and steps outside a smell of ozone, earth and damp hits him and all at once he thinks, ‘petrichor,’ but there’s another meaning, one he can’t recall and he knows it will probably be something that will occur to him well after he’s forgotten to think about it in the first place.

“Probably while I’m in the middle of filming a video or on the tube trying not to make eye contact,” he muses, locking the door behind him and setting off down the pavement to catch a bus and meet friends for an indulgent day out. 

As he leaves he doesn’t notice the single magpie perched outside the window to the lounge, looking into the darkened flat with a black eyed stare, steadily observing and waiting. It rustles its plumage once and sings a shrill chatter in warning before it takes wing and flies off in a blur of black and white, its minute form disappearing into a density of shadows and overcast skies.


	2. Unnatural Selection

When it’s over, he’s left with a lingering dread of hibiscus blossoms, a sickening revulsion towards the sound of Saint-Saëns Danse Macabre and a hunger so ravenous it leaves him half mad and dazed.

This time it begins with goodbyes exchanged between him and friends, all of them trailing out the door of Louise’s home after a pleasant dinner and conversation littered with laughter and board games his mind was only half present for. He’s sure he’s done his best to dissimulate the guise of a more involved friend, with genial smiles and commiseratory nods inserted at just the right points in conversations. He has no qualms about being there, about being surrounded by familiar faces he really does want to spend time with, but he’s preoccupied in ways he doesn’t fully comprehend, except for the idea that it has everything to do with the dream.

_‘I talk of dreams; / Which are the children of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but idle fantasy.’_

Mercutio’s words fall in line behind his subconscious to offer a cynical observation of his dilemma and he tries to agree with Romeo’s friend on the dangerous nature of meditating too closely on garbled visions, but falls back to thinking about it all over again between bites of food and snippets of laughter. The latent thespian in him which exhibits its talents every so often as one of many of the subsets of character roles that star in his videos, thinks he’s succeeded in dissuading everyone from noticing how distracted he actually feels, until he hugs Louise goodbye and sees the knowing look in her smile and in her eyes that tells him, if no one else saw she certainly did.

"What?"

"What what?" Louise looks innocently nonplussed in a way that would be utterly convincing except Dan can feel the exchanged knowledge pass between them, a mental tug that suggests, ‘I know and I know you know I know.’

He gives her a pointed stare that she returns, smiling wide eyed, until she breaks down and laughs into the back of her hand and he’s tempted to join in at the absurdity of them both, once again, being able to know without a word just when one of the other of them was acting out of sorts in ways only they could tell. Dan is glad for Louise whose humor, much like Phil’s, stems from a benign source where even when their amusement might be at the other’s expense it was never contemptuous. Louise has a light all her own, a distinct way of drawing people to her with a sweet sincerity that Dan admires and he’s not the least surprised at how fast he’d come to consider her a friend.

"Look it’s fine," he says when Louise’s giggles have subsided.

"I didn’t say anything!"

"You don’t have to-it’s written all over your face." Dan points and circles the air around her face, bringing attention to the little smirk there until Louise gives in and laughs again.

"Well you looked a bit distant tonight, so I couldn’t help but to wonder if maybe you might have had a row or something?"

"A row? "He’s having one with his memories certainly, trying to grasp at the strands of a dream he knows he should just let go of but seems to defy his best efforts to do just that. "Oh you mean with Phil? No, he’s away with family. it’s fine. Granted it’s more convenient when he’s there to cook so I don’t have to bother, but I’m hardly disintegrating into misery when he’s away.”

 _Though, it just becomes harder_ , he amends to himself, _when home doesn’t feel like a home because it’s taken the shape of a person._

“I’m fine, really, just had a bad night’s sleep that’s all. I’ll go home, browse the interwebs until the early morning hours, fall asleep at a ridiculous time and get up the next day to spend an equally ridiculous amount of time editing-wash, rinse repeat.”

Louise gives him another quick tight hug and he knows this time he’s managed to assume a respectable facsimile of reassuring nonchalance that convinces her that everything is alright.

 _And it is_ , he thinks, nothing is wrong, _I just don’t know why I can’t convince myself of that._

As he says his goodbyes, all of them waving and knowing it’ll just be a matter of time before they all reconnect again via their facebook and twitter accounts, he can’t help but feel one less short like the metaphysical itch of a limb that isn’t there anymore and he recognizes this as the reminder of the empty space where Phil might be at home when he isn’t. They’ve been apart like this before and he knows he told Louise the truth, this isn’t exactly a spiral of misery, but it’s an uncomfortable sensation that’s hard to ignore. He’s unaware he’s humming the lyrics to Keaton Henson’s ‘Small Hands’ until he passes a woman who gives him an inquisitive, suspicious stare, holding her umbrella tightly to her chest, as if she finds an affront in the idea of strangers walking by themselves in the rain and humming songs she doesn’t know under their breath. He leaves off in mid hum and coughs into his hand as he turns away and tries to hide his embarrassment at being caught out, but the lyrics stay in his mind.

_Miss you terribly already_  
_Miss the space between your eyelids,_  
_Where I'd stare through awkward sentences_  
_And void through awkward silence_

He thinks it might be the morose weather compounded by his current frame of mind that’s making him reference songs with sadder themes than are otherwise appropriate for the circumstance. It’s ridiculous, this aching sensation when Phil is just a skype call away; only as close as a train ride to his parent’s house, but it sits with him, a grey idea because he knows loneliness is its own separate torture no matter how long it goes. There’s a safe assurance in Phil’s presence. They don’t need to be in the same room in the flat, but the idea that the other is just a walk down the hallway, their voices carrying through the walls in song, laughter or idle banter, fill their space, their home, with the vitality of presence. To feel happy, acknowledged and loved; to feel safe and unselfconscious, there was a time before in his youth when Dan wasn’t sure he’d ever find that happy medium of companionship and now that he has, any prolonged moments of time apart from such a significant source of validation and companionship nag at him like a mobile left at home, the singular sensation of missing a very integral part of one’s existence until reunited with it once more. It’s less about feeling ‘complete’, because he knows it’s possible to be secure with one’s own presence, but there is a power in the acknowledgement bestowed by a person who cares that overwhelms him when Phil is near and when absent he can’t help but to miss it.

Thunder makes a low grumble above his head and for a moment the sound is enough to carry away his greater concerns. He doesn’t have an umbrella and the light drizzle is already making the ends of his hair curl outward and away from his face so he knows by the time he returns home he’ll appear like a half drowned hobbit in the mirror. For now however, he endures the subtle touch of rain against his face and listens to the distant bellow of thunderclaps in night skies effaced by storm clouds. The entire panorama is leaden and grey and distinctly London, ingrained with a grim jawed solemnity under the trappings of its pricey shops and tourist traps. He thinks that’s probably why traveling to Florida or the Caribbean is such a shock to the senses. It’s like being hit with an explosion of color and heat that rivals the murky gloom of London as if he’d forgotten that life held vibrancy outside the realm of a chiaroscuro relief; But the city had its own beauty too and he sees it in the rain giving a glowing sheen to the pavement under his feet and how the streetlamps made long reflections of themselves in the small puddles rippling on the stones, like wavering incandescence on the dark waters of the Thames so it’s easy to imagine he’s actually walking on the surface of a small lake, all the streets suddenly transformed into one uneasy liquescent path he might at any moment break the surface of and float off into the upended London reflected on the path. 

If Phil were here he would comment on the absurdity of it, possibly make a case for opting in a cab instead of walking, but Phil is not there and the idea of withstanding the entire ride home by himself in silence, trying to look more interested in the scene outside his window rather than make small talk with a cabbie more garrulous than he can endure right now, is tantamount to the same awkward torture of sharing a long elevator descent in mind numbing tension until the doors open again. Even if he could successfully waylay attempts at polite interrogation the fare in London isn’t dropping any lower and their flat isn’t so far away that he can’t endure a bit of light rain the few blocks it will take him to return home.

As he walks he thinks briefly on how night has a way of making London more vivid, all the tourists packed away into hotels or trailing out of theatres along the West end, employees getting into cars and cabs and trains towards home so that London settles into itself and becomes what it might still be if bereft of people: a hulking whispering amalgam of past and present, a survivor of war and plague and fire, an old city of bloodshed and upheaval where its ghosts sometimes walk the Tower of London or glide by on the banks of the Thames. It’s a city not always kind to its own, etched in histories of political upheavals and riots that resonate further than the ghostly echoes of droning bombs that once left half of its history pocked with the husks of spent bombshells and bullets. There’s a distinctive rhythm to London at night that Dan likes, a hushed reverence which falls when Big Ben tolls the hours of the evening and streetlamps drenched in raindrops flicker into brightness. It’s the particular sensation of being one of the few people walking along streets usually bustling with people, now empty and quiet save for the whisper of passing cars and the occasional far off greeting between two friends as they pass one another on the way back to their respective homes. There’s a slight edge of danger and mystery to it all, a suggestion which whispers, ‘ _you really shouldn’t be out here; you should be home,_ ’ and another whisper which implies that he can do anything now, as if all the rules by night fall no longer apply. There’s an intoxicating freedom that comes with late night sojourns in big cities, a limitless supply of possibilities and he’s not sure what that means for him apart from idly enjoying the moment, but the feeling persists and he breathes it in gratefully, the brisk snap of the wind and the rain and the ozone in the air as pleasant as the distant intoning thrum of thunder overhead-all of it an electric chorus winding together in a sensual aftershock of pure sensory overload that leaves him heady.

It’s at that moment his mobile pings with a text alert from his back pocket. When he retrieves it and sees the sender is Phil he can’t help but to smirk. Of course it would be Phil with impeccable timing, Phil who endured his more cerebral observations of life, the universe and everything in between, listening along and nodding only to say at the end, “Okay. Look at this gif of baby ducks in a mini waterpark going down a slide,” not out of disinterest, but as a way of gently steering Dan into a more comfortable state of mind where his thoughts didn’t loop around into an endless philosophical quandary with no viable answer either of them could supply. It feels the same now, his heavy thoughts of London and thunder in the night pushed neatly aside by a message from Phil asking if he’d arrived home yet, coupled with a smattering of emojis narrating Phil’s successful train ride home to his parents. There’s a chicken emoji in the middle of it all and Dan’s not sure he’s ready to ask why.

“ _Not yet,_ he types back, _Just leaving Louise’s. Walking home now._ ”

“ _OK. Talk later,_ " comes the almost immediate reply dotted by a smiley face.

When Dan pockets the phone the looming promise of the empty flat he’s meant to return to rises back to the surface. He imagines making hot chocolate for himself when he gets back and then texting Phil about it with the suggested implication of, ‘if you were here you would have made this for me instead.’

He’s paused at a zebra crossing, waiting for cars to clear so he can pass safely, thinking about getting back home and texting Phil, when he looks up and sees the flower shop across the street for the first time.

It’s lit like a golden beacon in the dark. The windows are filled with an extraordinary array of tropical blooms and roses in vibrant colors that defy the dark evening rain showers. The shop’s distinctive architecture, somewhat art nouveau, all curving lines and sinuous shapes above the lintel; its façade nestled into a receding alcove of the stock brick building above it, looks almost otherworldly, surrounded on either side by shops that have long gone dark for the day. It’s lovely, he thinks, and when he’s finally able to cross the street he finds himself inexorably drawn to the windows to take a closer look. 

The shop appears to still be open. The interior bathes him in a muted golden glow that looks warm and inviting against the cold drizzle dotting his hair and shoulders. He imagines Phil studiously observing the plants and making comments about buying a nice addition to the flat, which Dan can already hear himself preparing a counter speech for how that might not be the best idea, but the roses are full and expansive against the windows, more blooms and ferns vying for rights to be seen in their tight conglomeration next to each other, all of it forming a mini paradise that evokes visions of past trips abroad which strike Dan with the overwhelming inspiration to step inside and buy a flower for his desk. In part he thinks the little redecorating urge might have to do with visiting Louise whose home is filled with quaint details like a grouping of freshly cut flowers in a tall clear vase on a windowsill that makes him want to try something similar. 

“ _Just a rose or a small bunch of flowers to give a little pop of color to the desk can’t hurt,_ ’ he thinks, knowing he’s just trying to make an excuse for taking his time returning to an empty flat. 

He swings the door open and confronts what he can only describe as a contained forest. It’s what he imagines it must be like to step into a Ghibli film. Everything is lush and overwhelming. Dan isn’t sure how the proprietor managed to fit so many ferns, miniature potted trees and flowers all into the relatively dense confines of the shop, but every inch of available space has been negotiated into a display area for as many arrangements that can fit. It smells of flowers and incense, a mixture that might otherwise be a cloying disaster, but here they combine into an ethereal background aroma he can withstand. A piano plays softly from a stereo in the back of the store in a lilting adagio he doesn’t recognize but finds pleasant to listen to. There’s no one else in the store save for him, he doesn’t even see an employee loitering behind the service desk which is swamped by tall curling fronds save for a bare space of mahogany which contains the till and a silver bell behind a plaque which reads, ‘ring for service.’ He feels a bit out of sorts being here so late on a quest for flowers to grace his desk and resolves to buy the first thing to grab his attention, but there’s too much to look at, everything draws his interest at once and he’s about to just give up and grab a bouquet of white and red roses when he notices a table full of potted plants that look like miniature trees with trunks made of intersecting branches winding around each other. He thinks they might be a type of bonsai and moves to read the display tag in front.

“Money tree plant,” he murmurs aloud, “rumored to bring good luck and fortune into the home. Also good for filtering pollutants from the air, money tree plant absorbs benzene from the air, a common pollutant found in car exhaust which can cause dizziness, headaches and drowsiness, making this plant an essential addition to urban environments. Huh.”

He doesn’t buy the shtick of fortune and good luck because if they functioned as advertised everyone in the world would buy these plants along with the lucky bamboo he sees decorating the windows of every kitsch and souvenir shop, but the part about cleansing the air along with how unique and strange the little plant actually looks endears him to the idea of buying it instead of flowers. He doesn’t succeed in convincing himself that he doesn’t actually mean to give the plant to Phil when he returns home.

  


No one makes an appearance as he waits patiently and when he rings the silver bell on the counter no one answers. He wonders if maybe the proprietor had actually left and forgotten to lock up, which he muses would be the kind of situation he’d walk right into, but it’s only until the piano’s adagio fades out before picking up again in another tune that he realizes that the music isn’t a recording but someone actually playing the piano from somewhere in the back of the shop. 

“Hello?” He calls out once, but the piano’s muted song is the only response he hears.

Slowly he makes his way past towering arrangements and rounds a sloping corner that reveals the shop is larger than he first thought. The back space appears reserved primarily for inventory as he passes untagged trees and bunches of flowers in temperature regulated freezers meant for filling orders of sprays and wreaths. The piano grows louder as he proceeds and a small twinge of uneasiness afflicts him at venturing so far from where customers were supposed to go, but it’s a residual discomfort that vanishes completely when he steps into the room housing the piano and its pianist, a woman of tall bird-boned stature in a dress of crocheted lace so long it cascades over the bench and onto the floor in a spill of elegant train. Her hair is one thick plait reaching well past the middle of her back, in a color he can’t decide is a washed out platinum or merely white with age. He can only make out her profile when her head turns to watch the keys and it seems mature but not elderly. The room itself is a conservatory stocked to brimming with enormous hibiscus blooms in the deepest shades of red he’s ever seen. They’re nestled in every corner, trailing up against the glass walls all the way to the low hanging dome of the ceiling above. A fine mist of humidity frosts every inch of paned glass from the heat kept at a subtropical climate for the flowers to grow. The colors of the blooms and the vivid green of their leaves remind him of a Dario Argento film he saw with Phil once, Suspiria, he recalls the name; and he remembers the startling vermillion paint of the set designs overwhelming every shot, from the elaborate kaleidoscopic stained glass windows to the labyrinthine hallways in a suspenseful color dynamic evoking passion, love and murder. The only contrast to the color scheme in the conservatory is the glossy black of the baby grand and the off-white lace of the woman’s dress. 

The music she plays and the way her hands play across the keys in graceful practiced arcs makes him self-conscious about his own playing and although he knows he should politely interrupt so he can pay for his simple purchase and leave without awkwardly gawking at her in silence, he’s enjoying the music too much to cut her short so soon because he understands what it’s like to be in the moment as she appears to be now. There’s a singular joy in listening to good music and a special ecstasy in being able to make it, he thinks, to feel bound by the knowledge of the next note to hit and the next and the next after that in quick succession; to know when to exert the right pressure to allow everything to stitch together in a composition that flows like water until it’s an afterthought that only looks easy on the surface; achieving a mechanical magic with keys striking piano wire beneath polished wood and metal, music filling the room striking off the walls like rain, echoing with resonant clarity through the ears, down the spine until the piece connects everything in tune, every sound falling into place where it should, fingers a blur across the keys, left hand crossing over the right to keep a comfortable position to weave the notes as they come, until glancing at the staff paper is second nature, cursory glances that can’t compete with the ways practiced fingers recognize and remember the upraised plateau of white and black keys beneath them. It’s a breathless and chemical pleasure that leaves the player blind to everything else but the music in a rapture that leaves one spent and embarrassed when it’s done, because on the one hand for the musician it’s never good enough and on the other hand in the eyes of a rapt audience it was.

It’s only when the chords of music finally fade to silence that he realizes the woman has stopped playing and is staring at him over her shoulder, her hands frozen in position above the keys. The light here is duller than it was in the front of the store, the only glow coming from miniature spotlights on the floor providing soft blue illumination for the flowers, enveloping the piano and the player in a blur of shadows that make the expression on her face indistinct, but he can only imagine what she must be feeling at seeing a tall man dressed in black, drenched with rain, standing in the doorway and clutching one of her plants in total silence.

“Hi, er-sorry, the shop was open and I just wanted to buy this. I didn’t mean to disturb you.” He holds the plant up in the air and wiggles it in a mock wave and then, when he realizes what he’s doing, quickly tugs the plant back in towards his chest and clears his throat.

“You’re not disturbing me,” she says and her voice has a distinct inflection to the words, an accent he can’t pinpoint. She turns around on the bench to face him fully, the white dress folding in towards her circuitous movement like a Fibonacci spiral that leaves it tucked out of place around her feet and where it’s gathered in her lap so she carefully plucks the folds and wrinkles out of the hem with the rounded points of nails that are painted a shimmering copper. The lace looks thin and delicate enough to rip with the least obtrusive of movements, but she deftly tugs it into place without her nails ripping a single strand away, reminding him of an egret he saw once preening its feathers in a pond. What he can make out of her face is vague, without the hallmarks of the very young or the very old, but what he can see in the haze of shadowed light reminds him of old black and white films featuring stage actresses from the thirties and the term commonly used to describe them as ‘classic beauties’ although he’s never been certain what that phrase is supposed to mean exactly.

You play beautifully,” he offers her a compliment in the hopes it’ll smooth over his standing there like a mute golem while she played.

“Thank you, the piano is an old love of mine. I haven’t had much chance to play lately, so when I have the opportunity I indulge.”

Dan understands as he hasn’t had much time to sit down lately and play the piano in his room with any degree of true dedication as he otherwise would like to save for when he lets his fingers play across the keys in a haphazard melody on his way out the door. “I know what you mean.”

Her head perks up in interest and he can make out a small smile on her face. “Do you play?”

“A bit, enough to hold my own, but not as good as I’d like to. I dabble for a while and then drift away to something else and forget about it.” He leaves out the part where his tinkering is accompanied by a flatmate who meows along lyrics for the benefit of a few thousand live viewers and thinks he might have lost her interest enough already by admitting to dabbling.

“Virtuoso or not, you do play therefore you have an appreciation for what music can do or be. That’s admirable enough. Anything other than piano?”

“Drums, a bit of guitar,” again he omits the collection of rock band guitars in his room and hopes she won’t start questioning about what manner of Gibson or Strat he might prefer.

“Ah, it’s only the piano for me,” she says, “I used to play large halls in my time, but I prefer the buskers one sees around London without the benefit of exclusive events and fancy attire. They are amazing with their guitars and violins and pianos-sometimes all at once. Do you do the same?” She gestures in the air as if looking for the right phrase with the uncertainty of one who knows English but hasn’t yet mastered all of its dizzying variations of grammar. “Do you play for a crowd?”

“Well, I entertain, but not with music,” he says then wishes he hadn’t.

“Entertain how then?”

He always dreads this question when it comes up because there’s never an eloquent way of going about explaining it to most people who will understand.  
“I film videos for the internet,” he goes on quickly before the wrong idea can assert itself in her mind. “I have this channel on youtube-“

“Ah, cat videos and..and-” she searches again for the right word, “vlogging, yes?”

He nods in relief that she understands. “Right, right, I do that, the- er, last part, after a fashion. No cat videos. Well, there’s the bit with cat whiskers, but that really doesn’t count.”

“Cat whiskers?” The woman looks confused and all at once he wants to rewind back a few minutes and edit that part from coming out of his mouth.

“I live with a friend and we film together sometimes and the videos just take creative turns, one of which, the- er whiskers, became a kind of hallmark for us both over time.”

“I see,” she says in a way which suggests she doesn’t. “Is it successful what you both do?”

“Successful? Well it pays the bills alright now, so yes. We’ve hosted the Brits, have our own radio show and we’re picking up more viewers and subscribers every day.”

“That’s wonderful. You hardly need that then to help you.” 

She smiles, pointing at the tree in his hands and it takes him a minute to understand what she means.

“Oh the good luck thing? No, I just…liked it.” He shrugs and stands there out of place jostling the little tree between his hands.

“Hmm, good, there’s nothing of luck in it at all. Mary understands.”

“Mary?”

“The owner.”

Dan frowns. “Oh, I thought you were-“

“I don’t work here. This isn’t typical uniformed attire for a florist after all.” She gestures to the dress with open palms. “You could say I’m- standing in for Mary temporarily. You would like to pay for that, yes? Shall I package it for you?” 

“Yeah, thanks.”

She stands up from the bench, her dress gathering around her legs in a swoop of fabric. The heels hidden beneath her hem click an echoic staccato that reverberates around the conservatory with every step. There’s a regal air about her movements and the way she studies him closely, like an empress looking over her subject for signs of deference, seems to demand for him to bow and kiss the red stone of the silver ring on her hand as she nears him. She pauses in front of him and he finds it strange how difficult it is for him to look at her face, like trying to stare at the horizon through a shimmering haze of heat rising from blacktop on a scorching summer day. Her eyes keep drawing him in so he’s able to focus on little else. Later, when he tries to recall what she looks like he’ll find it impossible to list the details that comprise her features. She’s nearly as tall as he is although he surpasses her by a few inches, but if she’s bothered by the difference in height she doesn’t show it and merely looks him over.

“Yilmaz, by the way,” she says, extending her hand forward and for a moment Dan thinks she really does mean for him to kiss her ring after all before he realizes she merely wants to shake hands.

“I’m Dan.” He takes her hand in the briefest of handshakes, a furtive thing that’s done and over quickly, but in the seconds her hand is in his he’s startled by the strong, chilled grip of her thin fingers. The silver band of her ring digs into the skin of his index and middle finger with a pressure that leaves an imprint of cold on his skin long after he lets her hand go.

“Dan for Daniel then, which means ‘God is your judge.’ How must that feel?” 

“Extremely concerning,” he says and she laughs.

“Yilmaz is Turkish. It apparently means indomitable or brave. Either way, people always find it an odd name.”

“You’re from Turkey then?” He follows behind her, careful not to tread on the snaking train of her dress, as they proceed out of the conservatory to an adjoining room no bigger than a walk in closet used as a storage space for rolls of cellophane wrap and packing paper in every color sticking out from shelves all along the walls. Baskets of ribbons and scissors crowd the surface of a metal table in the middle of the room and Yilmaz takes the plant from him and sets it down on top without bothering to turn on the light, using only the faded glow trickling in from the front of the store for illumination.

“I was born and raised in Turkey, but I moved to England recently. For me at least it seems recent.” Yilmaz pauses as she selects a roll of brown paper from the shelf and smiles as if reflecting on a private joke. “I was always fond of the piano but the theatre was my first love in the arts. I used to work at the Gaiety Theatre here in London until its short lived terminus, producing plays and sponsoring young talent. Now however all one needs these days is an internet connection and a video camera in order to be heard. I would call it a new shade of narcissism, but then my experience with technology remains something to be desired, so it may all just be bitter grapes with me. Do you know I recently discovered how to hashtag? It was such a revelation.” 

_Wait until you learn how to meme, it’ll change your world forever,_ Dan thinks.

“So far have you had a good experience with what you do-with your- vlogging?”

He nods. “It’s been a bit of everything over time, but I’d say the good outweighs the bad. There’s plenty reason to be cynical about it, it’s not perfect and like you said I suppose there’s a latent self-aggrandizing air about it too, but really, what form of self-expression isn’t? If you think about it the internet is this valuable asset for a generation that might otherwise go unheard. No one has to wait around for people with ‘connections’ to recognize them and validate their abilities. If you have something to say or something to show you can, for better or for worse. When it works at its best, it’s a great tool of communication.”

He doesn’t mention how it helped connect him with someone who largely encouraged his interests into the career it is now, how he eventually went from distant admiration to calling that person his best friend, how they went on to live together and make a name for themselves in a way that when he looks back on it reads like the most unlikely scenario for a novel.

“Yes, yes, how very interesting…” Yilmaz nods slowly and looks at him with an appraising manner which makes Dan believe her assessment has little to do with their topic of conversation. “I always wonder though if those of you who commit yourselves to these videos are ever prepared for the double edged blade when it becomes more than they expected?”

“What do you mean?”

“With you, with your…particular set of contributions and ascending fame, does it ever get out of hand?” Yilmaz’s dark eyes flicker up and to the side, searching for what she means to say. “Your pseudo celebrity status- is it everything you thought it might be?”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t really thinking it might be anything if I’m honest. I know I enjoyed making videos but I didn’t start out assuming it would be this…big, you know? It’s strange in a way. I don’t regret how far I’ve come, but some days in retrospect it seems a little too much to stomach-all the demands for transparency with parts of my life that are too personal or cherished to parade around in the public eye-it’s a constant balance of giving a bit but not too much, of being accessible but not giving all of who you are away to strangers that won’t understand or dismiss out of hand. Sometimes you just don’t want to reveal things that others might take for idle entertainment value, when it means so much more than that.”

When he’s done he realizes he’s said more than he otherwise might to a stranger he’s only just met, but Yilmaz stares with an intent fascination that compels him to speak.

“Then you understand the caveats, not many do.” 

“It’s always there,” he says, “the threat of being too caught up in the moment that you give too much away or start being directed by your audience. And it’s the internet, isn’t it? There’s always going to be naysayers that attack your efforts no matter what you do or say. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it’ll hardly change overnight, so the only thing to do is adapt and carry on. As with anything I suppose.” 

“You would have made a fine actor. You have the diligence to deal with the business end of the trade. My pupils had the talent, but many lacked the foresight of managing their personas in the public eye with hardly as much pragmatism. People tend to forget that mankind has made idols of people as far back as ancient Rome and have been tearing down those same idols or propping them on pedestals higher than is reasonable for far longer than that. It can be overwhelming for the idol in question when they’re flesh and blood and not silent marble.”

Dan thinks about the whirlwind years he and Phil have spent establishing their personas online and all the pitfalls and obstacles that have become part and parcel to their unique careers. Some days it had been more difficult to understand just where he wanted to go with his videos or how to maneuver around the comments and expectations of viewers and critics, but he reflects that all things considered they’ve done alright in the end. 

“It reminds me of Antinous.” Yilmaz continues in a brief aside. “Much the same thing happened to him, although I’d say his fate squared off even in the end. Not all of my pupils were ready to receive their gifts. A pity really. You’re the first one I’ve met with the crucial qualities they lacked.” 

Something slides between them as she turns her head and stares at him in contemplative silence as if considering a question she hadn’t asked him yet. There’s a palpable weight in the air like an encroaching storm cloud and his chest constricts with an emotion he can’t place. It’s the static charge in the air before a lightning strike or the slipping looking down the side of a steep cliff to the rocks at the bottom, a dizzy inevitable feeling of expectation before the plunge, but he can’t understand for what or why.

Suddenly his text alert calls out from his back pocket and the tension pops with an anticlimactic rush that leaves him fumbling for his phone to see another text from Phil asking if he’d arrived home yet.

“My friend,” he says apologetically and glances up to Yilmaz who has quietly gone back to tucking the plant inside a brown paper bag and placing that inside a plastic one.

“The one you live with and make videos with, ah, that is-the cat whiskers, yes? You both must have a very close friendship. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.” She murmurs the last bit in a low tone half to herself.

He raises his eyebrows and laughs. “I hope you mean Stoppard’s version.” He thinks about it and then frowns. “Or not actually. If anything I think we’re compared more with Ant and Dec.”

“I agree. It’s a better comparison, considering the former never met with happy fates. There you are then, one money tree plant of dubious fortune packaged and ready.”

“How much?” He’s reaching into his pocket for his wallet when she waves off his efforts.

“Take it. ‘On the house,’ as they say. I haven’t had this pleasant of a conversation in years. Consider it a token from an old woman who likes to talk, for the youth who had the patience to listen to her.  
”  
“You’re hardly that old,” he smiles as he takes the bag from the table.

“That’s very kind, but I won’t fault you the mistake. Have a care, getting back, Daniel.”

“Hey, thanks. Good night.”

He leaves her there in the storeroom and as he leaves he can feel her stare all along his back like a trickle of ice down his spine.

******************************

Later, back home when he’s had occasion to shed the soggy outer layers of his jacket and tousle the beads of rain from his hair the smell of the shop’s curious scent of flowers and incense lingers on his clothing, wafting up whenever he moves. In his relief to be home his experience in the flower shop and its eccentric employee fade to the back of his mind with dismissive concern. Instead he turns his mind to Phil and texts back about his arrival home in which Phil’s quick reply reveals the reason for the incongruous chicken emoji earlier, where apparently Phil had encountered a chicken sedately walking along a path by his parent’s house as if it were just out for a leisurely stroll. Out of all the strange happenstances that have ever involved Phil’s interactions with the outside world Dan believes this one has to be the least odd.

He’s unpacking the plant from its secure wrappings and idly watching another text from Phil light up the screen when he sees a glinting shine at the bottom of the bag.

“Oh, shit,” he says as he reaches in and pulls out a distinct silver ring with a red stone, the very same he’d seen on Yilmaz’s hand. The ring is heavy and cold in his palm with an intricate band twisted like a Celtic knot at the center of which appears to be a bird clutching a ruby between its talons. It looks like an antique heirloom, an expensive one that’s now in his possession.

“Must have dropped off her hand into the bag when she put the plant in there,” he thinks and briefly panics over what do with it. The florist shop is not too far away from the flat that he can’t conceivably run back out and give it to her. He considers going tomorrow, during the day, but between wanting to catch a proper night’s sleep where he doesn’t have to worry about being up early tomorrow and staying in the rest of the day to work on editing a video while reviewing ideas for a new one uninterrupted, he resolves to bring the ring back now. 

He texts Phil back to say he’s stepping out momentarily and quickly snatches up his jacket and keys to run out the door. He’s in so much of a rush, his mind set on getting this over quickly so he can return and properly melt into the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a movie, that he forgets his phone in the lounge next to the plant on the table. 

The light drizzle of rain is heaver now, not quite a downpour, but he thinks if he doesn’t complete his errand soon he’ll return to his flat a sodden mess. He’s not concerned with the state of his hair, an unruly gorgon-esque mess on his head that will only become more of a disaster with the new coat of rain falling over him. He’s altogether grateful when he sees the façade of the shop rise in the distance. The front of the store is no longer lit and for a moment his heart drops thinking she must have left already when he notices a soft glow emanating from the back of the store where a light is still turned on. He tests the door and it swings open easily admitting him once more into its warm forested interior. Yilmaz is playing the piano again, he can hear the strains of the music playing out a melody he recognizes as Danse Macabre as he makes his way back to the conservatory, her ring in hand.

The rain picks up with force and drums down the sides of the conservatory in a mesmerizing hum like separate drumbeats, a rhythmic pulse that he would listen to in complacent silence while browsing if he were home. In the dull halo of the spotlights on the floor the rain leaves trailing shadows that silhouette all along Yilmaz’s dress like spatters of dripping grey paint. This time, when he enters the room, she doesn’t continue playing the song to its conclusion but stops midway, the last note suspended in a ghostly echo that trails away to the murmur of thunder in the distance and the steady beat of rain against the glass.

“You’ve returned.” She addresses him without turning around.

“Yeah, sorry, but when I got back home I noticed your ring in the bag.” He holds the ring aloft between two fingers, its stone flashing a lurid crimson brighter than the hibiscus surrounding him. Yilmaz turns her head to cast him a blank stare over her shoulder and once more he’s drawn to the startling void of her dark eyes, unable to look away.

“Maybe the plant was lucky after all. For one of us. This is twice now you’ve surprised me, all in the space of one night. It’s very refreshing. Please, allow me to repay you.” She stands up, ever the portrait of regal authority as she moves forward with slinking deliberation to retrieve her ring. 

There’s a primal instinct wired into the brain, an animalian impulse that fires under dire circumstances where the danger isn’t at once recognizable by the part of the mind which filters images through the lens of logic and common sense. It’s a visceral instinct which coils into the stomach and tingles along the jaw that tells the body to flee when confronted by dark corridors in abandoned buildings where nothing is visible save for shadows, something which tells the body through raised hairs on the back of the neck and an itch of paranoia that there is an intruder in the house though none are immediately visible, something which tells a child through overwhelming discomfort when an adult means them harm although their voice is saccharine with promises of candy and a too wide grin. It’s the same impulse that twitches at his fingers and insinuates itself with a cold leaden grip on his spine as Yilmaz approaches that makes him want to drop her ring on the floor and run full tilt out of the shop although he doesn’t know why. 

As she moves the shadows of falling rain gather into the hollows of her face along her cheeks and in the space of her eyes, reminding him of a figure from a Nicola Samori painting he saw once, all pale skin and dense shadows eroding the features into a melted horror of a deformed phantasm. He’s always been sure that if he ever did face real danger he’d be able to flee, curse up a storm and raise hell or high water to escape any situation, but now true terror holds him fixated, a deer in headlights, as the slow tapping click of Yilmaz’s heels stalk towards him. 

‘ _Back to the wall, back to the wall, back to the wall-_ ’ It’s the only discernible thought spinning in his mind and although largely unhelpful in its suggestion his legs move of their own volition, piloting him backwards towards the exit, but his small bouts with clumsiness rises to the fore and his left foot catches the side of a terracotta pot on the ground. He stumbles backwards, the ring falling with a forgettable clink of metal to the floor and Yilmaz’s hand extends forward in a claw like grip of copper tinted nails that snares his shoulder as his other hand fumbles for the wall through a crowd of hibiscus and hits a light switch, abruptly drowning the conservatory in a garish white glare that reveals Yilmaz’s face to him for the first time.

Fear prickles up his arms and settles in his stomach like ice, numbing its way through his skin and making his teeth clamp so tight his molars ache. She has no pupils; rather there are no visible whites of her eyes to see where pupils should be. Instead her eyes are two deep pools of black ichor. Looking at her face which he sees now is drawn with a cadaverous pallor that reveals the ghostly blue black network of veins beneath the skin, he wonders how he had ever mistaken her for human. There is no beauty to her in this harsh light. Any imperfection would be a welcome hallmark of humanity. Instead she stands as a brutal imitation of Bernini’s statues rendered by a more vicious hand that distresses every nerve in his body and stirs an atavistic response in him so primal it paralyzes him more completely than the cold, manacled grip of Yilmaz’s nails in his shoulder.

It occurs to him then that what he feared most about the hypothetical potential of supernatural creatures existing was not what they were thought to be or do, but that there was no real answer to discredit the possibility of their potential existence out of hand. Science provided a logical order by which things were proven by most tenable theories to run, there was a safe convenience in science, the visible world governed by laws of physics and calculus and geometry working in unison with one another to provide reasonable explanations the mind could endure. Even as a shark reared a bullet train head lined with serrated teeth ready to devour one in deep waters there was a natural expectation for its presence there, an opportunity to escape its maw by a well-placed punch or the safety of a raft, all earthly predators, human and animal had a reason to their presence if not always for their actions and in these reasons lurked equally reasonable opportunities to escape and avoid, albeit not always successful ones. But if a ghost paused one night to stare from the upper corner of a darkened room or a creature ran an elongated fingernail up one’s spine in the darkened length of the hallway after a midnight sojourn to the kitchen for a glass of water, how would they be banished, how could they be thwarted and in the absence of answers what could one do but be held captive in fear by things outside the realm of the explicable? The supernatural could not exist but the possibility that if it did it would have no restrictions, unnerved him.

This was not a universe where people like Buffy or Blade or the B.P.R.D could be called upon to deal with the things that went bump in the night. And one of those things, a creature with a vise stronger than a marble statue, was currently curving long copper tinted nails under his chin, forcing his head to tilt up at a severe angle so the veins in his neck corded with strain as his breath came in shallow pants through his nose, until all he could see was a crowd of blood red hibiscus flowers twining their way up to the ceiling. 

“In the old days the emperor Hadrian loved a boy called Antinous and sacrificed him in exchange for his own health. I’m sure you’ve heard the tale. He became immortal; I was there to see it happen, but that part of the story is never told. At the time it was better for the world to believe he died in the winding river. The gods are fickle judges, Daniel, in our court we select those worthy of deifying in denial of mortality. So as one whose namesake claims God as his judge, consider yourself deemed worthy.”

She murmurs into his ear, in a soft whispering sing song of a voice that makes him swallow hard because her mouth is too close to the side of his neck, cold breath skating along his skin and he knows with a deadly certainty that this proximity however intimate does not hold the promise of a kiss and if her mouth will not offer her lips to his skin he knows there are hard teeth behind that small smile, teeth that are as sharp as the clawed grip which holds him in place and as if to assure him of this her nails grate a little deeper into his shoulder, pinpoints of pain that finally shock him into motion.

He twists away from her and for a moment thinks he’s succeeded until a wrenching sensation alerts him that her nails have actually furrowed past the cloth of his jacket into his skin, drawing small lines of fire across his shoulder with the force of his backwards momentum. He’s faintly horrified at how she calmly follows his fumbling trajectory as he tries to back away from her, calling to mind every horror movie with a gliding specter undeterred by screams and pleas for help. His hands grip her arms and all at once he wishes he hadn’t. They are chilled bands of thin skin and hard bone beneath his fingers. His fingers scrabble at the delicate lace sleeves, tearing them into fraying strands, but although his knuckles pale with the force he's applying she doesn't react, as if he really is gripping an animated statue. 

His attempt to flee doesn’t thwart her in the least and instead he finds his back abruptly shoved into a trellis full of hibiscus, the flowers tickling at his hair and ears, bursting out against his face as Yilmaz forces him backwards still until the wood of the trellis presses into his skin and along his spine with a discomfiting pressure that threatens to break his bones.

“You’re not real.” His breath is a gasp pushed through gritted teeth and her lips curl up in a snarl of a smile and he thinks of goddesses, of primeval, profane deities unspoken of in texts, to whom hideous blood oaths might be sworn in the darkest recesses of ancient forests where light and hope grew thin.

“Little giaour, after this night is done I promise you’ll believe in many things, not the least of which will be what you become. It was the same with me after all. It is very difficult to be the thing in the shadows you once looked over your shoulder to find, but if you survive this you will receive more accolades than you dreamed possible. It’s been so long since I found someone worthy of bringing over.”

“Please.” He’s not sure for what exactly he’s pleading, for his life, for his sanity not to break, for him not to have to endure the cold draught of her breath along his face-everything at once.

“There are some who say Antinous went willingly to his death- that he sacrificed himself for the one he loved and there are others who claim it was a selfish act on Hadrian’s part and that he fought back against it. He did fight, you understand.” She scents along his throat and he fights again to shove her off, but his arms strain as if he’s trying to shove a boulder away. The hectic thought comes to him in a moment of incongruous calm that perhaps he should have been more stringent about working out after all. He would laugh now if he had enough breath to do anything more than struggle for air. Hysteria has never seemed like such a viable option until now, but Yilmaz has opened her mouth and all he can think about are the two long curving fangs like twin lancets protruding from beneath her pale upper lip and he knows with sudden clarity as she bends her head towards his neck where they mean to go.

“The ones that survive always fight.” She breathes against his skin like a secret declaration of love against his carotid, before he feels the darting pain of her fangs sliding into the skin of his throat.

The pain is an immediate needling shock that makes him cry out and jolt painfully against the trellis at his back, but her hands moor him in place so every move is an abortive struggle. He wonders briefly if this is what a lion’s prey must feel like when the jaws snap around its neck in a choking vice, teeth embedded into the skin, leeching blood and air until it dies. Yilmaz’s lips purse against his neck and he can feel the way her throat convulses as his blood surges into her with a speed that’s terrifying and impressive.

Presently a drowsy calm overtakes him, a lazy inebriated sensation that makes him relax without meaning to against Yilmaz’s clawed embrace although his heart pounds frenetically against his ribs. If he were able to observe himself he would recognize the signs of shock, but as the participant all he feels is a cold tingling through his fingers and up his arms, melting his thoughts into a murky fog.

It reminds him of the time he’d become pleasantly drunk at a house party full of friends and acquaintances and people whose names he didn’t really know. Shots of liquor sat good and hot in his stomach filling his head with drowsy wonderful feelings that made him slide slowly to the floor against a wall, giggling at everything and nothing at all, words falling from his lips in sentences he only half understood as he said them to be forgotten later when he awoke the next day. Start Me Up thrummed from the speakers, the bass line seeping into the floor so he felt every connected beat like a loud pulse of blood that traveled up his legs and tripping up his spine to his head with a pleasant buzz he wanted to go on forever. He’d leant his head back against the wall, wide smile a banner of lazy satisfaction across his face, dimly aware of Phil lingering close by on the sofa next to him, his hand reaching up to touch Phil’s fingers in a gesture meant to reorient himself to Phil’s presence, a safe point of relevance in a world gone fuzzy around the edges. That night the alcohol had been good, the music had been good and the feeling in his body, a sensual freedom of being exactly as he was, free to indulge in the moment, had been wonderful.

It feels the same now although he’s distantly aware he’s going into shock, he’s losing too much blood and he’s dying.

His back grates painfully against the trellis as he sinks to the floor, too weak to support himself on his own any longer and Yilmaz follows him down, his legs tangling in the long train of her dress, her body a steady, cool weight pressed against his stomach and chest as she drinks at his neck in slow luxuriant gulps of his blood. The hibiscus loom over his head and in his drifting stupor the shadows of falling rain against the conservatory windows make the blooms appear to twirl in dizzy revolutions about him and all he can think of is how in the shadows they resemble the color of venous blood, rich and dark and lethal.

“Did you know they used to offer hibiscus to the goddess Kali?” Phil asks and his eyes drift sideways to see Phil hunkered down by his left shoulder, looking at him with bright green eyed solemnity. “It’s in the Wikipedia entry.”

“You’re not there,” Dan says or tries to say as his voice rattles out in a strangled whisper.

“But I’m always with you, Dan. Always.” His vision of Phil replies with such a pained expression on his face that Dan wants to reach out and touch the fingers of Phil’s hand placed so close to his own, but he can’t move.

“Play me something when you get back. I’ll make breakfast and we’ll waste away the morning together. Waffles you think?” 

Dan swallows hard and tries to reply, to say yes, but his throat is too dry and painful to speak. He knows in a distant part of his consciousness not ravaged by blood loss that he’s merely rehashing past conversations and putting words in the mouth of a friend who isn’t there, but the vision is far too bittersweet for him to disbelieve completely. Even at his most abstract and ephemeral Phil remains a reliable source of welcoming distraction, of love, of a security he wants nothing more than to wallow in at that precise moment, but Phil isn’t there so he makes do with the meager hallucinations he’s given.

His hand grabs for Phil’s again, but his extremities are heavy and numb as if afflicted with frostbite. It’s a surprise then when his hand flops to the floor and he feels cold fingers beneath his. He averts his gaze and sees a pale arm emerging from the scattered shadows of hibiscus plants. As if disturbed by his discovery a tiny spider, long legged and button black, skitters across the fingers of the hand and disappears into a minute crack on a terracotta pot. His eyes adjust to the darkness enough for him to see the body of the woman the arm is attached to. She’s turned on her side, eyes closed, unbreathing, short cropped hair laying in disarray, her throat rimed with dried blood and on the front of the light blue apron over her clothes is a nametag which reads simply, ‘Mary.’ Here then is the revealed owner of the flower shop and all at once Dan realizes why Yilmaz had suggested the money trees had been anything but lucky for her.

He’s struck by the sudden delirious urge to laugh, but he notices Phil, the convenient mirage version of him, looking down with silent concern and Dan tries to reassure him that everything is perfectly fine in a slurred whisper meant to express an intentful promise to spend a lazy weekend in and while the hours away on video games and music and talking about nothing and everything as if their plates aren't full of commitments that threaten their lesiure, but what he means to say never quite forms coherent words. 

Yilmaz finally pulls away with a look of satiation and stares down at the ruined hollow creature he’s become caught beneath her grip and mumbling to a person only he can see.

“Mind me now. This is the important part.”

His blood is a splotch across her lips like a swath of morbid lipstick that she licks away with a tongue stained a livid red. Her complexion is no longer sepulchral but ruddy, imbued with a fleeting pink flush he knows is merely his stolen blood swirling in the veins beneath her skin. She looks less like a starved phantom now and more human, but her eyes remain baleful, dark things he doesn’t want to have to look at anymore. He focuses instead on Phil who stares back down at him, both of them ignoring Yilmaz for each other, one of them caught in a fugue and too muddled by blood loss to care and the other a produced vision that has no real thoughts at all for anything that is happening, but in Dan’s mind Phil is there with him and he focuses on that familiar presence in lieu of the creature moving above him.

He’s so willfully entranced by Phil that he sputters when something cold and dripping is pressed against his mouth, forcing his lips open until warm liquid flows into his mouth with a taste of copper and salt. A rush slams his thoughts into an overdrive of awareness that alerts him just how thirsty he is and how filling the taste of the warmth coursing over his tongue feels. His throat works in a paroxysm as he swallows and the thirst grows into a vicious whiplash of need that makes his hands grip whatever is pressed against his mouth with bone cracking force. Phil’s vision, once clear, fades away into a shimmering afterthought until Dan’s only concern is his need to drink.

It’s only later, when the whirlwind of this encounter staggers into better focus that he realizes the object pressed to his mouth is Yilmaz’s arm and the liquid flowing into his mouth is her blood, replacing all that she took away from him in a process that doesn’t make any sense on the loosest of biological terms save for in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet, despite how impossible it is, he's enervated by every thick draught of blood pulled into his mouth. A dangerous frenzied desire to glut this newfound appetite overtakes him and if asked to explain it in better terms he might liken it to sex, to a slick, hectic tumble between the sheets; two bodies starved for contact amid rough whispers of wanting more and more and more. 

His thoughts fire off on tangents too quick for him to follow no matter how hard he tries and the sudden need to have Phil there at his side so he can relate the experience to him stings like heartache, but this time there is no mirage to offer him Phil’s form and he is left alone, roiling in pangs of thirst.

His head lolls drunkenly and his eyes roll in languid pleasure at the taste, now not so much like the bitter tang of salt and metal, but of a richer, deeper vintage without a name, too distinct to simply be called blood although that’s all it is, Yilmaz’s blood mixed with his own, given to him in an odd twist of reciprocatory gratitude for the ring he had the misfortune to return. He wants to explain every detail of this moment to Phil- this is important somehow, critical in the most essential way, like when he wants to discuss the dynamic oeuvre of a musician he admires and explore all the nuances of a song whose lyrics have speared him through with the impact of its message hidden in turns of phrase and symbols that would be easily overlooked on first listening. This is free fall, dire overflow and he’s too high on sensation to realize this is just life and death and the threshold in between, all of them inexplicable save for when one suddenly became the embodiment of the inexplicable itself.

When Yilmaz pulls away after what seems an eternity Dan rears up with vicious single minded intent to snatch her arm back, but she evades his grasp and drifts away from him, her dress slithering along the floor in the dark like a ghost, leaving him grappling with empty air. He twists over onto his stomach, hands clawing at the floor, teeth gnashing, still blindly searching for the taste, for the blood, when a sharp pain tears at his abdomen and fires up into his brain like the worst migraine he’s ever experienced. It’s electric and consuming, contorting his spine and trembling along his jaw with a force that bends him into a shuddering circle on the floor, knees drawn up close to his chin as he gasps. He can sense Yilmaz’s shadow blanketing him as she stands in silent contemplation.

A deep seated itch starts along his gums, over his molars and reaches its pitch at the eyeteeth of his mouth. He would claw at it, try to scratch out the unbearable sensation, but his hands are locked into claws around his arms as shudders continue to wrack his muscles and twist his bones. His head turns by degrees to make out Yilmaz’s figure. Her hair is wild around her white face, tendrils escaping from the long plait along her back and her dress is a tattered wispy ruin of a cerement spotted with blood he knows is his.

“What did…what did you…do...to me?” He forces out the words from a numb and swollen mouth. His eyeteeth feel as if they’re growing out of his gums, elongating into thin points until they touch the teeth of his lower jaw and curve subtly inwards to fit in his mouth like a viper’s fangs.

Yilmaz says nothing and the smile she gives is awful and faintly leering. He can still taste her blood in his mouth more potent than liquor and he hungers, still he hungers.

Between the pain encompassing his head and the terrible thirst worming its way into his stomach he’s all too grateful when darkness finally overtakes him. His head tilts back into the spill of hibiscus petals on the floor, the conservatory dimming out of focus until the rain pouring down the glass resembles hazy constellations and before he’s lost to blank dreams his last cohesive thought is with a friend who is miles away.

 

In the unsettled quiet of the flat his mobile lights up with a text from Phil in an earnest request to know if he’s alright, followed by three more which all remain unanswered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Right. This was a mouthful of a chapter. It began as two seperate chapters while I was drafting it out, but I ended up cutting things as I went along and decided in the end to combine the two.)
> 
> Yilmaz is based on the 'Yalmauz Kampir,' allegedly a vampiric creaure of Kazakhstan mythology with copper claws whose name supposedly tanslated to 'vampire who licks her mouth.' Trying to look up references brought back nothing to support that information, but I wanted to keep the spirit of the original idea and just changed a few details around to make everything fit the model I wanted for Yilmaz's character. 
> 
> The term "Giaour" which Yilmaz uses briefly to address Dan, is a Turkish epithet, but also refers to a poem of the same name written by Byron which references vampires or implies that was the fate of the 'giaour' mentioned in the text.
> 
> Moral of the story: Don't visit florists after dark.


	3. New Born

It’s all very blue, Dan thinks, when blue meant being on vacation in sunnier places where the sea mirrored the cloudless sky in an astounding lucid turquoise hue, when blue was less like a color and more like a mood that meant something other than melancholy. He wonders if he experienced the world in shades of synesthesia if he might be better able to think of a word for what blue might look or feel like, this kind of vacation blue, Caribbean blue, where the only thing he has to worry about is finding where Phil is seated on the beach and try not to spill the drink in his hand as he wanders down the sandy turf, backdropped by the cries of gulls overhead and the crashing waves at his side. Their hotel is also ‘blue,’ although the color of the walls in their room is really somewhat taupe and mundane, but it’s also ‘blue,’ it echoes the feel of the beach and the sun and the sky, combines them all together in one feeling without a name. It may have something to do with the fleeting nature of vacations themselves, a transitory place of indulgent delight frozen in a moment in time, before their loan of carefree pleasures is over and they have to take the plane back home. It’s in the bed they jump on which isn’t their own, it’s in the late night trips to the ice machine down the hall with the sound of their muffled laughter and running footsteps bouncing off the walls and the garish carpet under their feet, it’s in the crystalline water they dive into and resurface from with dripping hair in their eyes and grins on their faces. Moments that will become snapshots of pleasures he will think of as that time when everything was ‘blue.’ He thinks Phil might understand if he explained it, Phil who seems to grasp the concept of qualia without even trying and manages to embody the word at the same time, but Dan isn’t sure he really understands it himself. It’s an indefinable thing, better felt than explained, like enjoying a favorite drink he could review in a thesis fifty pages long and still never come close to describing how it felt for him while drinking it. 

He finds Phil laid out on a beach towel under a palm tree, his entire form dappled with shadows of the fronds waving in the breeze above him. His arms are behind his head and sunglasses cover his eyes so that Dan is unsure if Phil is awake or not beneath them, but as he approaches Phil’s head tilts up and he smiles to show that he is. 

“Hello, you,” he says. He slips the sunglasses off and leans his head back onto the towel, his eyes hooded in an expression of peaceful languid contentment.

Phil’s hair is a riotous mess of flecks of sand and drops of surf that somehow, to Dan’s chagrin, manages to retain its layered shape perfectly even when he gets up later to tousle the sand out of his hair in a way that makes it resemble an unruly mane. Dan doesn’t want to know what his own hair must look like, although when he fussed over it by the hotel bar, trying to tame the curls slowly overtaking his head, Phil had told him not to worry, that it looked fine, beautiful, Dan thought he heard him murmur, but when he’d turned from the reflective mirror of the bar’s surface to confirm if he really had heard that comment Phil had already looked away towards the beachfront and the gulls gathering there in a small swarm over an abandoned plate of food. 

“What is that,” Phil asks him and points at the glass in his hand.

“Rum and pineapple juice. It’s good. You want anything?”

Phil shakes his head and closes his eyes and he’s never looked more like a cat with cream, utterly blissful. Dan experiences a twinge of heat in his chest that he pushes to the side as he takes a seat in the sand next to Phil.

“Well, good, because I would have told you to get off your butt and get it yourself.”

“Aww, what a generous friend.”

“Absolutely.”

They don’t say anything else for a time, but there’s little left to be said. Their morning has been an exhausting list of enjoyable errands, of swimming in the ocean and then watching the foam capped waves speed past the hull of the boat they’d ridden on between sips of alcohol and snippets of conversation. Now they relax into the silence and Dan digs his fingers into the sand to feel the grains run past his knuckles. Small pleasures, mundane delights, somehow elevated to the level of sublime when idly experienced in the company of a friend.

“We should do it, move to London, like we talked about.”

Phil breaks the silence without preamble and Dan furrows his brow as he looks at him.

“What brought this on?”

“I was thinking about it, what we spoke about before with the super amazing project and pitching the idea and I really think we should do it-send in our tape and convince them it’s a good format for the radio.”

Dan stares at him and only just manages to save his glass from tipping over in his hand. “I don’t know, are we really ready for something like that? That’s-moving to London isn’t a joke and our bank accounts aren’t exactly bottomless.”

“You said you wanted to.”

“Yeah, I want to do a lot of things, film, travel, hell, I’d like to host an awards show one day or write a book together if I thought I had something worth saying, but this is-I don’t know if I’m ready.”

“Why not?” Phil turns on his side and leans up on his arm to fix Dan with a determined, unyielding stare that just makes Dan think, how so very blue and he knows it has nothing at all to do with the color. “Who could be more ready? You’re brilliant. The work you do is brilliant, the ideas you have are brilliant-to say anything, to do anything at all, especially when it’s the things you love to do, needs courage and that’s you all over. You are so very brave.”

Dan opens his mouth to speak, to keep the heat from rising along his jaw into an unbearable thing, but Phil raises a hand to stop him from speaking. “No, you are. Think about it. You trusted me enough to move in with me, to be friends with me-“

“Phil, honestly, there’s no bravery in that- more like it would be extremely difficult not to be friends with you.”

“Even if that were so-“

“It is.” Defiance straightens Dan’s back and gives a gleam to his stare as he and Phil regard each other in brief silence, the air between them charged with more than a vehement declaration of fond amity for one another.  
It’s been like this since they first met and it has only grown and strengthened into a bond tighter than any expertly wound sailor’s knot that not even they know how to break even if they wanted to. This is love, something fierce and strong and blue, when blue meant a connection that transcended the most realistic notions of how friends met and remained and grew into something more than the word friend could ever imply; when blue embodied the sense of qualia surrounding Phil, transforming him into something beyond definition, when blue was listening to someone you loved encourage you without pretense, when blue was not the color of the ocean in his eyes, but the way the eyes looked at you as if you were the only person in the universe who existed- who mattered. 

“Even so,” Phil continues, affection soaking his voice into a resonant murmur, “it’s not like that was a decision either of us knew might work out, but you did it anyway. You were brave enough to continue recording even when you weren’t sure about anything you wanted to say, when you weren’t sure if people would listen or understand and they did. You’ve come such a long way. We both have, but you haven’t given up on this because it’s important to you and…it’s important to me too. So let’s try this. Between the two of us we can handle the rent until we get word back from the BBC. It’s a risk, but so is everything we’ve done up to this point. And even if it doesn’t work out we’ll still be here and you’ll still be the same Dan with the same brilliant mind. Let’s try.”

There’s a beat, a stomach dropping heart pounding beat like the slow rise and rapid fall on a rollercoaster track and for a moment the beach and sun and surf dissipate to encompass two young men on beach towels discussing the path of their lives with an encouragement that leaves one of them speechless. With the space of a few chosen words they’ve created a point of singularity between them in which the outside world and its sights, smells and sounds ceases to exist. Even the reliable crash and flow of water breaking along the shore vanishes to little more than a low warble of noise.

Dan ducks his head and smiles in a way that is half between a smirk and a grin, all teeth and rounded cheeks that makes Phil smile wider. 

“I’m brilliant,” Dan savors the words as they leave his mouth and thinks they taste much better than any mixed drink he’s ever had. He reaches over and slips on Phil’s sunglasses. “Have to watch out for my own brilliance. Amazingphil and brilliantdan, wonder if it’s too late to change my username.”

Phil laughs under his breath and lightly punches Dan’s arm. “I’m serious.”

“I know you are and I do…I do want to try. It’s just a big step, isn’t it, moving to London on a vague hope that we’re actually good enough to convince a station our talents are contributions they actually want. It’s my whole life- _our_ whole lives- ahead of us on the line. What if it doesn’t work out?”

“It’s just a radio show, but if it works it can be something more and if it doesn’t-“ Phil shrugs. “We can go on to something else and try again later. None of this will change who we are.”

“Aren’t you confident?”

“When you’re with me I am.” Phil’s voice is low, but the sincerity is deafening and behind the sunglasses Dan looks away as if Phil has suddenly taken on an effulgent glare to rival the sun that not even the tinted lenses on his eyes can keep at bay.

“Alright…alright, let’s try.”

He sets his drink down on top of the hardcover back of the Stephen King novel Phil brought with him, (The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King more precisely he reads) then quickly places a few napkins between the glass and the book before Phil can protest about water stains, and unceremoniously flops onto his back, arms splayed wide on the warm sand. He can feel they’re on the tipping point of something greater, of trying to accomplish one in a list of varied goals, and they’re going to do this together, with their own individual skills and humor combined into a powerhouse dynamic yielding a support he would otherwise miss if alone; A support that would otherwise feel different if it were anyone else but Phil. He wonders if Phil feels the same way, then reflects that it might be a moot question to ask with the way Phil had looked at him before, the way they often regard each other like something rare and worthy of praise, like something legendary that feels like hubris to admit, but he’s never felt more enthusiastic about the possibilities of their future than he is right now.

Dan watches a gull catch the updraft of the wind and glide over the beach, its shadow trailing the sparkling waters for fish or a place to land. 

“It’s a bit ridiculous,” he says, “I’m here worrying about our future and agonizing over whether or not I actually have something worth saying when I’m sitting on a sunny beach in the Caribbean sipping a highball next to my best friend. I should do a video about this- worrying about small self-created dramas in a world where so much worse is happening. God, I could be dead, right?”

Phil turns his head, reaching out to touch Dan’s fingers in a light, barely there caress and smiles. 

“But Dan,” he says, “aren’t you?”

In the dark, Dan bolts awake and sits up with a speed that knocks his head against a large, dense object above him and sends him careening right back down as he cradles his head with a meaningful, “ _fuck!_ ”

There’s an ache in his jaw, a ringing in his ears and a tingling sensation all down his spine and ribs that makes him think he’s experiencing the worst hangover in the history of his life. There’s also an all-consuming thirst parching his throat and making his tongue feel rough as cotton in his mouth. It’s hard to remember anything, much less where he is and why he’s not in bed and instead laying on a cold hard floor. When he opens his eyes to squint past the pain from the collision on his forehead the world around him takes on indistinct amorphous shapes like trying to see past murky water.

He blinks and rubs his eyes until, gradually, the world seeps into focus with the plodding speed of a buffering video. It’s only then, when the conflicting mass of shadows and light take on better definition around him, he’s able to see that the object he’d bumped his head on is actually the underside of a piano he’s laying beneath. 

_A piano recital mosh pit gone wrong?_ He thinks dazedly and continues rubbing idle circles into his temple, half to relieve the pain and half to urge his brain to start remembering the pertinent details surrounding his confusing situation.

When he turns his head to see red petals of hibiscus blossoms twining their way up the conservatory walls memory begins to nag at him. Spears of sunlight falling through the windows and darting past the flowers illuminate small drops of blood on the floor and it’s in a convoluted flash of realization defined by black eyes, curving fangs and wispy lace that he finally remembers.

Instinctively, his hand flies to his throat and paws at the skin, feeling for the wounds which must undoubtedly be there, but there are no puncture wounds, no clotting scars, not even the sore mark of a bruise to indicate any detail of the violent encounter.  
_Mary_ … He looks around then for the body of the shop’s owner he’d noticed in his blood drained stupor, but in the spot where she had been is nothing but a collection of undisturbed terracotta pots and withered petals. 

_Was it a dream,_ he thinks, _did I just get hammered to the point of passing out in a bloody florist’s shop-which granted wouldn’t be too outré for me considering the time I…outré? Really? No, that’s it I must have been properly pissed last night. But then…why the blood? Why am I here and not at home or at Louise’s-how did I-when?_

His thoughts trail off into white noise in his head as panic immobilizes him and he turns over slowly to press his forehead against the cool surface of the floor in the hopes that if he just focuses on breathing, lets the cold seep into the skin of his forehead, it might by association soothe the desperation burning into his brain, muddling all sane reasonable thought. The thirst however reaches a fever pitch and he finds himself desperately swallowing the little saliva in his mouth in an effort to assuage it until, finally, the need to drink coupled with his desperation for comprehension becomes altogether unbearable. He needs to leave this place, to find anything to drink, to go home, inexplicable encounters and fuzzy recollections be damned.

Crawling out from under the piano however is a separate gauntlet in itself. Every muscle in his body aches as he inches forward. It’s worse than any sprain he’s experienced after a strenuous run and the pain in his head dials up a few more degrees to add to his discomfort the closer he gets to the light beyond the shadow of the piano’s edge.  
After careful twists and turns to minimize the protesting strain in his joints he manages to emerge most of his torso and is about to breathe a sigh of relief when his hand lands in a puddle of clear sunlight. 

Immediately a burning sensation electrifies its way down his arm and slams into his chest with the force of a roundhouse punch. He cries out and jerks backwards; instinctively curling himself back into the safety of the piano’s silhouette and at once the pain in his head subsides, leaving him little more than a collection of shuddering gasps as he cradles his hand to his chest, too bewildered to understand what had just happened.

“What…the bloody hell?” 

When the pain ebbs into a tolerable ache he looks at the back of his hand and notices a livid circle like the burn from a car’s cigarette lighter fast receding into the pale complexion of his skin right before his eyes.

“What did you do to me,” he had asked Yilmaz before succumbing to darkness and he remembers how she had never answered and merely looked on in jeering silence as if the answer would in time become self-evident.

He’s not sure what exactly makes him feel along his mouth with trembling hands, but when he does at least a portion of his question is answered when he presses the pad of his thumb against the curving fangs his eyeteeth have become. They sit in his mouth comfortably, curving inward to align with his bottom jaw when he closes his mouth. When he opens wide they hook at a subtle angle outward like a snake’s fangs prominently displayed and in position to pierce the skin of anything unfortunate enough to come within striking range.

 _No. Nope, not happening. Not at all. Nope,_ Dan thinks as he shuts his mouth with an audible click of his teeth gnashing together to stop him from repeating no in an endless one word soliloquy.

Vampires, he knew, weren’t real, unless one was an opportunistic enthusiast of the supernatural looking to make headlines hunting down imaginary creatures in the Highgate cemetery between bouts of madness and vandalism. What did that make him then, he thought. There was no denying the way the light had burned him, no mistaking the fangs sitting like contained threats in his mouth and no dismissing the thirst grinding its way into every sinew of his body like a sentient parasite crawling just under his skin.

“No,” he closes his eyes and places his hands over his face. “This is a dream. I’ll just sleep and wake up again, properly this time, and this will not be real. Not at all.”

Sleep however does not come for him. His thoughts are too frenzied for him to relax and instead he curls up into a tighter ball under the piano and waits and thinks and argues with himself as the hours of the day pass outside the conservatory windows until the rays of sunlight begin to weaken and tremble apart into crepuscular hues. It’s only when the soft light of dusk floods the conservatory and lengthens the safety of the piano’s shadow into a mantle of darkness across the floor that Dan tries to emerge again. This time, in the encroaching dark his body feels settled and free of pain, but his thoughts remain humming drones in his brain and the thirst persists to tug at him, willing him to drink.

 _Drink what? Pimms? Chocolate syrup from the bottle? A barrel of Ribena?_  
He has a need to parch the thirst, but he doesn’t have a keen desire for any particular beverage. The very thought of soda or water induces a dizzying sense of nausea in him so strong he wills himself to stop thinking about potable liquids at all.

There is another option, his subconscious slyly provides, one that fits the bill for this unique dilemma and Dan decides he’s had enough thinking for one day.

He struggles onto his knees and grabs the piano bench to steady himself as he takes the first step towards vertical motion. As soon as he’s up and standing however his legs quaver and he deposits himself in a rush onto the bench.

 _Breathe,_ he thinks, _just breathe._

It’s only when he quiets and tries to meditate on the calm exchange between exhaling and inhaling that he realizes there’s something very important missing in the muffled silence, a sound he only misses once he finds it’s not there. 

“I have no…heartbeat.”

“ _Hello, internet! Today I’m going to tell you about the time I was attacked by a vampire, passed out in a florist’s and woke up later to find out I had no heartbeat. Really sounds like the kind of impossible encounter Phil might walk into, but there you are. Now I know what you’re thinking- Dan, you’ve finally gone mental- and hey, you wouldn’t be half wrong!_ ”

Once more hysteria knocks for entrance and he’s at the threshold of just giving into the absurdity of the moment and laughing uncontrollably in the absence of any more sensible reaction. Fangs? No heartbeat? Sunlight burn? Suddenly it all seems like a Derren Brown trick gone horribly wrong and he wants to find the camera crew surely waiting in the wings to reveal the phenomenal prank he’s been the victim of. 

“ _That’s right, Daniel, listen to my voice. There you are, you’re under nice and deep and at the sound of my voice counting to three you’re going to wake up and remember how I hypnotized you into thinking you were the participant in something out a B horror movie. Now listen for it, listen to my voice and one…two…three._ ”

Time proceeds with interminable silence around him as he waits for a sign, anything to prove this experience is a farce or a terrible lucid dream, but no one leaps out at him from the shadows of the conservatory to reveal how punked he had been and no inception worthy special effects manifest to show he’s in a dream, leaving him with the dubious option of having to admit that whatever had happened was real, that whatever he had become now was also real, no matter how impossible or terrifying that idea actually was.

 _No, there must be something,_ he thinks and places a hand over his chest where his heart should be beating just beneath the heaving cage of his ribs. _I’m functioning, I’m aware and alert, there has to be something there._

He puts his hands over his ears and listens for a pulse, for the unmistakable rush of his own blood filtering through his body.  
There had been something in an anime about this, one of many he and Phil had watched one morning together. He can’t remember the title in his panic and wonders how strange it is that the most anomalous references will come to mind in moments of desperation. He does recall it was a series of sequential chapters all rooted in a surreal, dreamy narrative. The setting took place in a dense forested jungle involving people’s encounters with supernatural creatures of varied shapes and sizes and went on to detail how their lives were afterwards changed in unnatural, irrevocable ways when their paths intersected; but although he recalls little else about the anime overall, one episode comes to mind. One about a woman afflicted by a strange illness that caused her to go deaf and how in the absence of all sound she had been able to put her hands over her ears and listen to the welcoming sound of blood cycling through her body with the hushed roar of flowing lava.

He remembers he and Phil looking at each other and trying it simultaneously without any prompts and being delighted at finding it worked as advertised, that the inner freeway of blood rushing past the veins in his hands truly did sound like the rushing murmur of a lava flow. 

There is a small, strange hope in it, an absurd hope, but he grabs it and places his hands over his ears and waits and listens.

For a time there is nothing but unsettling quiet, the deafening kind of silence after the first large snowfall on a winter’s night, void of any signs of life, but then he hears it- too faint to be normal but unmistakably there, a tiny, intermittent pulse of drumbeats spaced too far apart from one another for him to be functioning now. It’s not the most reassuring development but he takes it for what it is, an inconsequential sound he would otherwise dismiss, suddenly elevated to the most salient detail that orients him when nothing else can.

He tries again to stand and this time finds his legs support him. The light falling into the conservatory has meanwhile segued past the glow of dusk into the true darkness of purple and grey evening shadows. An eerie quiet falls into place, broken only by the distant caterwaul of a police cruiser’s siren drifting away and the whisper of cars passing by on the streets.

He’s careful as he proceeds away from the riot of red flowers in the conservatory and the memory of his encounter there, into the unlit environs of the shop itself. Paranoia tingles at his head and he can’t help peering around every few seconds to search for hidden threats. His vision has never been a point of concern, unlike Phil who regularly swapped contacts for glasses, but Dan finds that suddenly the world is in hyper focus. It’s not difficult at all to see past thick shadows and delineate the shapes of objects that might otherwise be hidden there. He can easily count the serrated edges of a leaf on a fern, perfectly see every variation of green on its surface, see the small ladybird resting on the lip of the pot, although he’s at a distance where noticing any of that should be impossible. It’s a development he would stop and examine if his primary concern had been anything other than wanting to leave the shop once and for all.

Every tall silhouette of a plant in the corner reminds him of a woman in a white dress with blood on her mouth and talons on her hands. He does a double take every few steps to scan the shadows for her, but it quickly becomes clear that whatever fanged creature lurks here in the unsettled dark only wears his face and the idea manages to disquiet him more than the thought of Yilmaz lurking nearby to finish what she started.

When he reaches the front door it’s with no small measure of relief that he finds it unlocked and he wastes no time rushing out into the cool evening where a light drizzle has come and gone leaving its mark on the darkened concrete of the pavement and in the fine droplets still clinging to the streetlamps. Outside the city is bustling with early evening activity. Pedestrians mill about in front of shops and cross the streets; buses and cabs trundle by on their business, the sound of their exhausts and engines overlaid by a steady thrumming tympana that soothes him, all of it an orchestrated display of a big city in motion, of welcome normalcy in his part of the world which seems to have upended itself into chaos.

A small crowd of people pass close by him and the sound of the bass line increases as their laughter fills the air. It’s then that the thirst, once just a nagging irritation pushed aside by his greater concerns to flee the conservatory, crescendos with a force that leaves him clutching the wall and turning his face away to the rough surface of the bricks so that no one will see him involuntarily bare the fangs in his mouth. It’s a raw instinctual reaction, a primal lizard brain urge that pesters him with the message to, “ _Bite! Bite! Bite!_ ” It overwhelms him and it’s all he can do to dig his nails into the furrowed cracks of the wall beneath his hand and not grab the person nearest to him and slide his fangs into their neck. 

When the group passes, their voices subsiding into the distance, the drumming sound leaves with them and he realizes then that the noise was not just part of the consequential ebb and flow of the city as he’d first thought, but instead their heartbeats beating in percussive synchrony. 

His involuntary reaction to that sound only confirms what he had suspected since he first discovered the fangs in his mouth. The thirst was galvanized by blood and only blood would satisfy it, but what unsettles him more is that he finds the idea not as unappealing as it should be. He should be horrified and he thinks that on an intrinsic level he is. There’s no denying how half of his subconscious rejects the idea wholesale, but the other part, the part curious and driven by his transformation into a more feral state of mind, finds the thought of playing a vampire true to the nature of its appetite utterly fascinating.

Now that he knows what the sound is he can’t stop hearing it like an overplayed song on the radio he doesn’t have the option of turning off. The need to drink is severe and he stumbles off down the pavement with the idea of getting back home and burrowing under the covers of his bed in the hopes that maybe the familiar environs will allow him to regain some peace and a hold on sanity. He doesn’t trust himself in a cab or on any form of public transportation which would force him to endure a cacophony of pulsing heartbeats in a confined space. Yet, even walking provides its own share of obstacles in his condition.  
There are too many people outside, thousands of commuters and idle revelers with destinations and conversations in tow, all of them with a deafening pulse inviting him to drink his fill. He veers away from the overpopulated streets down into a dark and narrow cobblestoned alley, hoping he can find the least obtrusive way possible to get home without being seen by people or without people noticing him. He makes it halfway down the path undisturbed when a beer can goes flying against the wall at the other end as three men exit a pub from a side door into the alley with him.

“You’re caned, you prat, why else do you think they kicked us out? You wouldn’t stop carrying on in there,” a man in a blue button up shirt with sleeves bunched up around his elbows shoves the man next to him who lilts to one side with a grin on his craggy face while their other companion, built like a golem in a black hoodie and blue jeans that have seen better days, looks on between fits of snorted laughter  
.  
“I wouldn’t have been carrying on if that cunt would’ve just apologized for nicking my stash.”

“What-a couple grams of that low grade garbage? You should be thanking him on hand and knee for doing you a favor. You got no sense of class. You want grade A shit, I know a bloke who can get it. Christ’s sake, you’re a fuckin’ mess,” the blue shirt clad man addresses his friend who has leaned over to the wall in mid conversation to make retching sounds against the bricks. When he straightens up he wipes the back of his hand across his mouth and cheers.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he says, “I feel better with it out than in.”

“That’s what she said,” their third companion chimes in and they give into raucous laughter.

“Fuck, I need a good fix. Oi, you! You got any shit on you, I’ll pay you good.”

Dan takes a moment to realize the man who had retched against the wall is actually addressing him and that now all three are staring at him, waiting for a response and he thinks maybe this would be the best time to feign ignorance and tail it back the way he came.

“Look at this little twat...I’m talking to you!"

“Hey, hey, leave ‘im alone, Lenny. You always get wound up tighter than a virgin’s arsehole when you’re blasted.”

“Nah, I’m talking to him, he better answer me,” Lenny calls back to blue shirt and advances on Dan, stopping him with a hand clamped on to his shoulder. “I said you got anything on you?”

“No,” Dan says and makes to twist free of the man’s grip, but Lenny bears down harder and shoves him back.

“I think you’re holdin’. Look at the state of you. I know that kind of look with those blood shot eyes- can’t even look at me straight. You’re flyin’ high, mate and I want in.”

“I told you I don’t have anything, alright? I’m not feeling too well and I’d just like to get home. Please.”

The other two men walk up on either side of Lenny effectively creating a restrictive circle that makes Dan uneasy, not because of their implied threat, but because he can hear them, all three of them, a trio of heartbeats with the promise of blood running warm and free under the surface. They smell horrendous, all of them giving off a bitter putrid odor as if they’d mired themselves in beer and tobacco while in the pub, but the sound of their pulse overpowers their rank stench and gnaws at a newfound instinct Dan really doesn’t want to act on. His fingers flex at his sides, contorting into claws when he contracts and relaxing back into trembling hands stiff with the need to answer the thirst. He just wants to leave, to immerse himself in the calming familiarity of home where he might be better able to think, to retreat until reason allows him to sort things out, but Lenny is cornering him against the wall while arguing with his friends about going through his pockets. The other two in their company unwittingly take on the guise of angel and devil with blue shirt advocating for them to just leave and the third agreeing with Lenny that they should take whatever Dan has on him. For his part, Dan thinks he’s had quite enough of strangers shoving him against various objects to last him a lifetime.

Later he swears it was nothing but a push, a small defiant show of force that ordinarily would have just made the other person stumble backward a few steps, but when he grabs Lenny by the wrists and pushes back, Lenny flies away from him and hits the far wall with an audible crash against the metal bins gathered there. The two men gape as they watch Lenny stagger up onto his feet with a string of expletives all strung together in a garbled acronym of outrage Dan can barely decipher save for the few obvious ‘cunt’ and ‘holy fucks’ he can make out. He doesn’t blame him, he feels about ready to repeat the same.

 _I did that,_ he thinks and looks down at his hands as if to confirm they’re still his and not terminator issue biomechanical implants. _No, there’s no way._

The golem of their third companion turns his face towards Dan and gives him a furious glower that carries the promise of retribution in its downturned scowl while blue shirt looks on at Lenny’s fumbled attempts to stand up and laughs.

“Ha, you’re right pissed, kid knocked you over like a set of pins!”

“Shut it, Neil” Lenny advances towards Dan with fists clenched at his sides in overt aggression. “You shite, the hell you think you are?”

“Just leave me alone. I don’t want to start anything with you.”

“Oh, you already started it-“

“Lenny, mate, give it a rest,” Neil sighs and places a restraining hand on Lenny’s shoulder but it’s roughly batted away by Lenny’s fist.

“Marcus,” Lenny directs himself to the third, “Hold ‘im. Going to teach this punk some respect.”

Marcus, every stout, broad shouldered bit of him, lurches forward to grab Dan’s arms and pin him to the wall in an attempt to make him an easy target for Lenny’s ire. He’s massive and muscular, a veritable tank of a human being with the bent hallmark of a broken nose and jagged scars on his head that advertise a past full of violent scraps. Dan’s never been on the business end of a scuffle before, avoiding possible conflicts and diverting crass commentary about his person before they can develop into a fight he wants no part of, but here he’s at an impasse where no amount of clever speech or cajoling will convince Marcus and Lenny to stop, the both of them too hotheaded with liquor and drugs to enter a compromise where they can all walk away unscathed. Neil, the only pacifist in their number, although worried, looks resigned to let everything play out without much strenuous intervention with the casual indifference of one who knows brawls are only business as usual when it comes to pub crawls with his friends. Dan has only one other option, to defend himself however possible until he can get away, but he thinks his earlier luck with diverting Lenny was simply that-a fortunate fluke that doesn’t promise to stand a chance against the sturdier figure of Marcus. 

_Think of it like a boss battle,_ he thinks in a rush as Marcus looms over him, _a boss battle with the possibility of real world critical damage and no respawn points, against a guy who looks like he eats the beer cans and spits out the beer afterwards. He’s huge, but probably ungainly so I could outmaneuver him and get the hell out of here into a crowd where they might not follow._

He feints to the side, ducking down low to evade the swooping grasp of Marcus’s arms, but his height puts him at a disadvantage when Marcus merely follows his downward progress with ease and grabs the back of his jacket in both hands, hauling him up and slamming him back into the wall.  
Frustration and incredulity that he has to be involved in this situation, now of all times when his body seems to be waging a war with itself he has no idea how to manage makes his thoughts foment into a white rage that pulls a snarl from his mouth. He pivots and blindly grabs at the front of Marcus’ hoodie. He’s upset, he wants to go home and rest, but tonight seems to be the night no one wants to leave him alone. In the next moment he’s yanked Marcus up so high his feet are dangling a few inches off the ground without any protest of strain whatsoever from Dan’s muscles. Without realizing what he’s doing he uses the force of his momentum to swing Marcus around like a rag doll and slam him bodily against the wall. 

The sound Marcus makes when he collides with the bricks is the thud of a cement block dropped from a great height onto the ground. It’s only then Dan takes in the gravity of the moment, to understand exactly what he had done; had never known he was capable of doing. Hauling groceries up the stairs to their flat most times left him laid out on the sofa, refusing to move until his chest settled from trying to asphyxiate itself, but now he’s just lifted up a man who must weigh little over fifteen stone without a breath of effort. He gapes as Marcus coughs and slides to the floor, effectively winded, eyes bulging in their sockets with almost comical surprise at being so easily waylaid. 

Lenny, too intent on a confrontation he means to win, wastes no time to reflect on how Dan had managed to floor a man much larger than himself and lunges for Dan despite Neil’s warning shouts for him to stop. They stumble for a moment in an awkward shuffling dance, Lenny with his hands bunched into fists from where they’ve grabbed Dan’s jacket, shaking him back and forth while spitting epithets, and Dan trying to find his footing before he joins Marcus on the floor. He doesn’t want to know what will happen if Lenny manages to knock him down, but understands it won’t be anything he could easily walk away from. Thoughts of an impending brawl however are carried away by the sound of Lenny’s heart pounding in time to an adrenaline rush of rage. A predatory instinct rises to the fore with a thrill of power humming into the deepest marrow of his bones.

His jaw aches with the need to bite and this time when Dan opens his mouth to reveal the fangs secreted away there he’s unable to turn away and unable to care very much that Lenny sees him.

He doesn’t know what his face must look like, but all at once Lenny freezes, eyes widening first in incredulous shock, then confusion and then fear. Dan sees these emotions flicker by on his face faster than messages on a news ticker and the energy in the air shifts from wrath to terror. Whatever Lenny sees on his face is clearly nothing that he expected to find, but Dan’s focus isn’t concerned with Lenny’s perceptions but with the sound of his pulse suddenly more strident with fear than it had been in anger. Dan’s mouth is yawning wide and his hands are rigid claws in the fabric of Lenny’s jacket and all he can see is the bulging veins in the neck and hear the frenetic rush of the blood they hold. 

Lenny makes an odd skirling sound in the back of his throat, like a rabbit caught in a steel trap and this time he’s the one struggling to break away, but Dan holds him fast with a strength he never knew he had. He’s leaning forward, mouth yawning wide, utterly oblivious to anything around him, ignoring the bright exclamation marks of alarm his subconscious is firing off in a frantic bid for him to stop. Distantly he can hear Marcus yelling something which sounds like encouragement for Lenny to ‘finish ‘im off’ and Neil adds his voice of protestation to a crescendo that’s lost under the cresting thunder of the heartbeat burrowing its way into Dan’s ears and tripping its way down every nerve. The thirst snaps and propels him with the pull of its need and Lenny is conveniently placed within reach of the fangs he’s all too eager to place in the prominent vein of Lenny’s neck.

The side door to the pub slams open with the sharp report of a gunshot and the owner sticks his head out, face ruddy with anger.  
“Get out of it! You idiots want to start shit take it somewhere else! I won’t be having the cops on my doorstep again to break up another one of your fights- You hear me?”

The shock of realization burns Dan like live coals and he relinquishes his clawed grip on Lenny who tears away to duck behind Marcus as if hoping to use his friend’s bulwark girth as a shield. Lenny’s face is wan with fright and behind Marcus he looks too much like a child who’d just glimpsed the face of the creature lurking under his bed. Dan would think it hilarious that anyone would be that afraid of him if he didn’t feel sick with panic over what he had just been about to do.

 _I could have killed him,_ he thinks. _Of course, he was ready to kick my head in, but it would have been easy, so very easy. I could have-I almost-_

“Did you see his face?” Lenny’s voice comes in a stage whisper. He’s still cowering behind Marcus, his former bravado forgotten. The others say nothing, clearly having not seen the startling change Lenny had noticed in Dan. Neil merely sighs, uninterested in this new development in his friend’s behavior and tugs at Lenny’s sleeves, trying to coax him towards the exit of the alleyway.

“Lenny, come on. We’re going. I’m not looking to wind up in the nick again because of another fight you instigated.”

“But his face-his eyes were black, I saw it- nothing in them, like holes in his face,” Lenny is backing away towards the exit without any further prompts from his friends as they exchange glances of wary speculation.

“All that garbage you put in your system tonight I’m surprised you’re not seeing the queen prancing around in her pants.”

“I saw it,” Lenny whispers again, still backing away and pointing at Dan with a tremulous finger. “What the hell are you? What in the bloody hell are you?!”

Lenny breaks away at a run, not waiting around for an answer Dan has no intention to give and the others follow after, calling Lenny’s name until they’re gone from sight leaving Dan alone with uneasy thoughts and an unslaked thirst that rips its way through him as if it really were a sentient parasite taking out its frustration at being thwarted by producing needlepoints of discomfort to prickle along his skin.

“ _His eyes were black…nothing in them, like holes in his face._ ”

A puddle on the ground offers Dan a reflection of himself when he looks down, but he sees nothing out of the ordinary save for hair which has devolved into riotous curls around his face and a tired expression lining his brow and under his eyes that speaks little for everything he endured the night before. 

Yilmaz had called him worthy before she’d accosted him with a transformation that left him reeling, but worthy of what exactly? What was he meant to do? Who was he meant to be now? Something new and raw and demanding resided within him, something which had little to do with his new physical prowess, but suggested something more transcendent. Yilmaz had suggested her intent to deify him, but what did that mean for him? To have all this power, to have a new means to view the world and the ability to take the lives of those within it at a whim-the implications were monumental. Lenny had glimpsed a fraction of his new potential and had been terrified.  
There was some level of surreality in the current life he led, where his name and the exploits of his daily life became a point of relevance for millions of viewers across the globe. He and Phil had in short order progressed from filming small talk in the confines of their rooms into self-made stars whose names were now synonymous with each other, creating a dynamic moored in the foundations of their friendship and professional collaboration that was inseverable. However strange and unpredictable he thought that life was he now inhabited a dark uncanny valley he didn’t have the first clue of how to navigate or survive. Possibilities and dire outcomes whirl in constricting scenarios he can barely keep up with. Struggling with his choice of career during university had been one long existential crisis he thought he’d put long behind him after settling into a career he actually enjoyed with someone who made the work more like a labor of love than a grueling nine to five in a dull office space under the harsh glare of fluorescent lamps. In one night his entire perceptions of the world, of himself and of everything he thought capable of existing had been neatly turned on its head so he felt like the Dan of years ago, floundering for meaning and motivation, for some purposeful connection, when Phil had still been just a face and a voice in a video upload he admired from a distance.

The door to the pub opens again admitting a crowd of people into the alley and Dan hurries away before he has a chance to get caught up in another inadvertent confrontation. He keeps his head low as he passes people on the pavement, ducking into sparsely populated side streets when he can as he makes his journey towards home. The memory of last night’s encounter coupled with his newfound thirst make it difficult to focus on his surroundings. London is suddenly a vibrant portrait of colors and sounds he’d never noticed before brought to hyper realization with senses that have been heightened to a degree that makes him alternately giddy and nauseated. It’s too much to process at once, like trying to focus on the details of baroque architecture with so much vying for attention, all of it equally important and grandiose in a way that gives him a newfound appreciation for minimalist designs. He doesn’t know what he means to do when he reaches home with a thirst that’s growing exponentially by the minute. There are tenants below them and he’s sure if he’s alone in the house he’ll be able to hear their pulses through the walls and just the thought makes his jaw ache all over again in sympathetic response. 

He pauses by a low retaining wall and sits down to close his eyes and rest. It’s all too much, too fast and he’s still hardly able to come to terms with what he’s become. 

A black cab slows to a stop behind a row of traffic on the street in front of him. There are two people in the backseat, he can see their silhouettes through the glass, indistinct but leaning subtly together in conversation and he wishes he was there, carried along by the car in the muffled quietude of its interior watching the city flash by on the glass. Car rides quiet his mind, lets him reflect on ideas he might not otherwise think of when brainstorming ideas for videos or projects in his room, something about the inspiration rooted in steady motion he doesn’t have to be conscious about lulling him into a frame of mind more conducive for thought.  
There’s a strange unique peace in car rides, especially at night, when the shadows of trees and power lines flashed by on the neon lit horizon; his reflection and that of the evening sky combining into one image on the window. It’s better on nights when the sky is clear enough and the light pollution not strong enough to block out the effulgence of stars overhead. Phil would occasionally talk to him about space and he would think how nice it would be to just drift in all that majesty, in the cold and the quiet, borne along in the back of a space shuttle floating past planets and galaxies, to have the opportunity to understand just what astronauts meant when they spoke about the overview effect; To become so immersed in the reality and grandiosity and humility of their place in the stars to the point of never wanting to return, like an existential crisis in reverse that incited euphoric bliss instead of paralyzing angst. 

Although he conceded in the end it might be just as debilitating to never come down from that emotional plateau to the detriment of everything he could have accomplished in life and instead becoming mired in the sensations of the moment forever. It would be isolating and terrifying when that high eventually dissipated to be replaced with an understanding that space was a yawning borderless expanse with no escape.  
Just watching Interstellar had left him wide-eyed in the theatre long after the credits rolled and he’d emerged into the bright noise of the lobby with his entire outlook on the world neatly scrambled up in a cosmic landscape and a sweeping orchestral sound. Everything else seemed grey and flat after that, a dull reverb of reality that couldn’t compete with the world still echoing in his head. He wonders if that was a small taste of what the overview effect must be like, a dizzy separation from reality and he wonders if that’s what he’s experiencing now, albeit a harsher version he can’t control where his heightened visual acuity yielded details that hurt his eyes and the sound of every heartbeat in a person’s chest became the clarion bell of a life he was now in position to silence if he wanted to. 

He looks at the stars and yearns for space, for quiet, for majesty without a pulse. He remembers Phil in the backseat of the cab with him one night on their way home, the both of them looking up at the stars suspended in the sky, each speck following the progress of their cab as if they were attached by invisible strings to the roof. They had simultaneously glanced at each other with a soft smile and a lingering look that said, “I like this. I like drifting in the quiet with you, when you appreciate these small things with me like I do with you,” and he thinks whatever the overview effect is, whatever euphoric sensation it encompassed, it could never compete with the feeling of that moment they shared side by side. It will be hard to find the quiet in anything now, much less in the small things, when everything is a roar and a demand and a pull from deep inside that speaks to something preternatural entrenched in his veins like the deepest roots of a tree. 

A plastic bin to his left suddenly crashes onto its side spilling a bundle of black bags onto the pavement. One of them splits on contact with the strain of its contents and leaks an oozing mess of rancid liquid and old food from the seam. As he watches, a lean fox, the apparent culprit behind the garbage mishap, appears from behind, nosing through the mess as it tries to find something suitable in the scattered offal for a meal. Dan isn’t surprised to see it. They’re a common sight in the city, gifted with the ability to seek out and root through garbage like raccoons and just as unable to give a damn about doing it within view of people. The fox spares him a disinterested glance of glowing eyes in the light of the streetlamps before resuming its culinary quest with scuffling snorts of its black nose.

"Well at least someone’s able to get an easy meal," Dan muses. 

He can hear the tiny heartbeat puttering away in the fox’s chest like a tiny outboard motor and all at once his thoughts whirr and settle with a question he doesn’t dare entertain.

At the same time he thinks, _But I could do it. It’s not a human, it’s just a fox, one of many. It’s technically fair game and bound to wind up on the wrong side of animal control eventually. Who would miss one fox? I’d be doing waste management a favor really, no more overturned garbage, win win._

His subconscious flops over onto its side like a distressed fish while asking, "Really? Really Dan? You’re trying to convince yourself about the ethical merit of killing a fox instead of a human? You are literally considering biting into a fox that’s been god knows where and infected with god knows what-exactly what the hell is wrong with you?”

_I’m thirsty, that’s what’s wrong and the least offensive meal option is currently nose first in a bag of garbage._

The fox rolls out an apple core with its paw and starts to gnaw at it with wet crunching sounds that sets Dan’s teeth together in an uncomfortable grimace at how much his own hunger begins its rapid ascent into the uncontrollable. He stands up before he’s even half aware of what he’s doing and begins a careful stalking tread towards the fox. It continues sampling the fruit’s tattered remnants, ignorant of the predatory glare Dan levels at its thin outstretched neck. Its row of white teeth flash between gnawing bites of the apple core and Dan bares his own fangs in anticipation, his shadow creeping up in a bleak mantle as he bends in careful degrees to grab the fox by the scruff of the neck.

At the last second the fox startles and notices Dan, its tail lashing out in a static charged bristle of panic. With a horrific screeching bark it drops its meal and dashes off down the pavement in a blur of red and white fur that quickly vanishes from view.

"You’re pretty shit at this, aren’t you?"

Dan whirls around to see a boy in a blue jumper and black jeans staring at him with a sardonic expression and swinging his feet on either side of the pillar box he’s sitting on.  
He looks only a few years younger than Dan with a pale complexion, tousled hair and a light dusting of freckles across his face. He appears to have dropped out of the ether like a silent ghost and he continues to stare back at Dan without explanation. The sound of his trainers thudding restlessly against the sides of the box takes on the unsettling cadence of a steady heart beat with an insistence more annoying than the atonic drone of a leaky faucet. It makes Dan’s mouth run dry and he swallows hard to try to assuage the arid lining of his throat, but the thirst remains a chronic ache quickly developing into a migraine along his temples that ratchets up a few degrees with every sequential thud of the boy’s feet against the pillar box. Realizing he’s in part to blame for Dan’s discomfort, the boy stills and squints at Dan appraisingly as if noticing a pertinent overlooked detail and then rolls his eyes with a sigh.

“Oh, new blood, is it? I should have known. No one else would mess up an easy kill like that. It’s just as well, I guess. Fox is horrid, tastes swampy and the fur gets all in your teeth.”

Between the pain of the thirst coupled with the shock of the boy’s abrupt appearance and his nonchalant criticism, Dan is able to do little more than gape openly in response.

The boy simply nods and continues unperturbed. “Must have been one of the old ones that did you otherwise your sire would be showing you the ropes right now. They can be real bastards that lot. Whoever did you really worked you over, I feel for you.”

“What?” Dan’s voice escapes in a high pitched whisper. Old ones? New blood? Foxes as terrible meal choices? There’s a mounting absurdity here in this impromptu exchange that trumps everything else he’s experienced tonight, something bordering on the edge of a Monty Python sketch he’s not ready to be a participant of.

“Don’t tell me this is your first night.” The boy’s dark eyes suddenly widen. “Ah, shit it is, isn’t it? Now that’s brutal, mate.”

“I-don’t-“

“Look, I’m no one’s nanny, yeah? And the way this usually works is you either wing it or your sire shows you how to work this out and clearly that last part isn’t panning out. You look like you’re about to keel over, that’s a sad state to be in, mate, I know. I’ve been where you are now and I would have appreciated a little help navigating the learning curve-so I’ll help you. One time only. Then it’s up to you.” The boy hops down from his perch on the pillar box and dusts off his jeans.  
I’ll be right back so just stay put and try not to harass the wildlife in the meantime. Easy to grasp?”

Dan stares at the boy and as he takes in the pale complexion, his sudden appearance and the nonchalant way he addresses Dan's condition makes the cogs slowly fit into place and finally turn.

“You’re a vampire.”

The boy’s eyebrows perk up and he laughs. “Er, yeah of course, what you’re just joining the conversation? It’s not always easy to spot another of our kind, well there’s not that many of us to begin with, but new bloods are always the most noticeable, especially when they blunder around trying to eat the urban foxes.”

Dan blanches and coughs into his hand.

“My name is Teague. Yeah, don’t start about the surname. I’ve been called that for longer than your mum’s great gran been on this earth so it sticks. Just sit there and don’t move. I can help you, but remember, tonight’s the only free pass you get from me, after that you’re on your own.”

“I’m not asking for-“

“Not asking for help?” Teague crosses his arms and smirks. “Sorry, thought you looked in too piss poor condition to say much of anything, let alone ask for help, but if you want to navigate this on your own I’ll mind my own business. Your funeral, mate, or someone else’s if you want.”

“No, please-what do I do?”

“Shut up and stay put. Should be easy enough. I’ll be right back.”

In his famished state time takes on a slogging tired pace that makes Teague’s absence much longer than it actually is. Dan wishes he had his mobile on him to pass the time, to try to divert his stressed worries with social media, a video, a text-

_Phil! Christ. I wonder if he’s texted me back. Probably has…and I haven’t responded to a single one._

He hadn’t properly considered Phil until now and he has to wonder just what Phil must be thinking at his lack of presence online or on his phone. They might joke about being too concerned with other things to care about where the other might be, he might brush off any concern for Phil with witty sarcasm, but he knows when push came to shove, if situations were dire they would definitely worry about the other. It’s happened before and they talk about near death experiences with wary humor they’re always silently afraid of ever coming true. He doesn’t have to wonder if Phil is thinking about him or worrying about what’s going on, he knows Phil is and he knows he won’t have an explanation plausible enough to cover the immensity of what he’s been through, not when he’s unsure of how to explain it to himself.

“Here, something to take the edge off.” Teague reappears with the noiseless grace of a specter and shoves something large and white under his nose that makes Dan jolt backwards, almost falling off the wall.

“God, you’re more skittish than a horse and just about as tall as one too. Just drink this, you’ll feel better.”

Dan takes enough time to notice the white object Teague proffers is actually a styrofoam container with a lid securing the top. In his other hand Teague holds a paper bag holding two more of the containers, all of them giving off a scent that’s faintly appealing although Dan can’t determine what it is. It’s the first time tonight any thought of food has been remotely appetizing in a way that doesn’t make him feel instantly sick and he takes it for a good sign. As he grasps the container in Teague’s hand his fangs have never felt more omnipresent in his mouth, ready to bite; ready to drink. Cautiously, he takes the lid off to reveal a thick glossy liquid that appears unctuous and black in the light of the streetlamp.

 _It smells…good,_ he thinks despite his initial reservations at its appearance. He takes another sniff and then slowly tips the container towards his mouth. It’s only when the liquid oozes a slow trail to his upper lip, right as he hovers on the edge of drinking it, that he realizes what it is and later thinks it a miracle he doesn’t drop the container right to the floor.

“This…is blood.”

Teague looks severely unimpressed and rolls his eyes again. “Sometimes I wonder with tall people if it takes a bit for the information to reach their heads and I’m starting to think it’s true. You’re a vampire, you berk, of course it’s blood. Fresh off the butcher’s block. In London you can always find one open late, it’s the good thing about big cities. If this were some suburban back roads country town you’d be shit out of luck. You’d have to hit up the livestock yourself and that’s no picnic as you saw for yourself with that fox.”

Dan continues to stare with faint horror at the liquid sloshing around the sides of the container and a part of him dearly wants to drink it and the other part just wants to chuck it into the street and run off.

“Look if it makes you feel better, it came from a butcher right? Animal was already set up for prime cuts, so it’s about as guilt free of a meal as you’ll get. Unless you were a vegan before then er-sorry, mate, but tough luck. Just try it and you’ll have a different outlook after you’re done. Keep staring at it and it’ll clot up into bits and that’s never fun.”

Dan wants to say there’s not much fun about this entire scenario as it stands, but he’s thirsty and he’s just been handed a convenient ticket out of his predicament if he’ll only accept it.

 _Try new things,_ he thinks grimly, then tilts the container to his mouth and drinks.

Whatever he thought blood initially tasted like, comparing it to the bitter metallic taste of a cut finger popped hastily inside a mouth without thinking, is nothing at all what it tastes like to him as he guzzles the contents of the container. It’s warm and sweet and spiced, filling a hollow space inside him with every gulp he takes. It tastes nothing like what he had taken from Yilmaz, it’s less potent than her blood, but the taste is nevertheless contenting and good. His throat works noisily as he finishes off the contents and his hunger recoils itself within him like a great snake, for the moment sated.

“You really were in a bad way, weren’t you? Never seen anyone chug it that fast before. Whoa, whoa, don’t start in on the others just yet!” Teague waves off Dan’s attempts to reach for the containers in the bag. “Give it a few minutes for your stomach to realize you put fuel in the tank first otherwise you’ll end up making yourself sick. I’m giving you these, but they’re for later, alright?”

Dan nods, still somewhat in a daze from the taste as he idly licks around the inner edge of the container for the small beads of blood left there. With the hunger gone he feels full and tired. He grips for the edge of the wall as he sits down and lets out a shuddering sigh of relief.

“Better?” Teague looks at him, warily holding the bag out of arm’s reach.

“Yeah, thanks for-for this.” Dan holds up the empty container in a salute and Teague smiles.

“No worries, glad I found you before you bungled your way into a blood bank or something. You try the butcher for a few you’ll get used to it. You’re not ready at all for human blood- you take a sip now it’ll be like a drug you can’t stop until you’re halfway across Whitechapel taking a page from Jack’s book.”

It takes a moment for Dan to understand who Teague means. “Jack…oh you mean, wait. Are you saying Jack the Ripper was a vampire?”

Teague shrugs. “Who knows? We may be monsters, but there’s plenty of the human variety that’ll do horrific things without the benefit of fangs and immortality.”

“Right.” Dan stares into the container and wonders at a future where his new grocery routine included trips to the butcher for pints of blood.  
_At least Phil won’t be able to steal my cereal anymore,_ he thinks. _Phil…god, I keep forgetting. How am I going to do this?_

“Hold on…I know you,” Teague tilts his head and looks him over closely, “Yeah, yeah, I seen you…on the internet. You’re that what’s his name, not on fire? With the videos-yeah! I subscribed to you awhile back. Liked the one about the cringe attacks-spot on.”

“Yeah, thanks, I think I’m having several right now,” Dan says as he peers into the red stained container. “And a few heart attacks for good measure.”

“Look at you, internet star with the radio show and now did by an elder-ha, lucky boy, or not so lucky depending on how you look at it.” 

Dan looks up and frowns. “You keep saying that-'I got did'-what does that mean?”

Teague sits down next to him and pats his shoulder. “I keep forgetting you don’t know nothing about all this. It's like what they say in the American mafia when they ‘make you,’ with vampires the colloquial term is ‘did you’ or if you’re one of the older ones what like fancier descriptions it’s ‘bring you over.’ Nowadays, new bloods, that’s you by the way-vampires that are just turned- have their sires to show them the ropes, tell them how things are done, but the elders are a traditionalist sort. Which is just a fancy way of saying they’re a bunch of stuck up cunts that take the tough love approach. They let you flounder around after you wake up, to them it’s a kind of rite of passage to see if you sink or swim. Think of it like a mother bird kicking her chicks out of the nest, except the nest is at the edge of a steep cliff with pointy rocks at the bottom. Other vampires might turn someone out of compassionate reasons, but the elders are more selfish, they’ll turn anyone they think might be interesting or ‘worthy’ as they call it. I think they just get bored and like to to see what happens.”

“So what happens if I fail-if I can’t control this?”

“Oh, bad luck, mate,” Teague looks around and his voice lowers to a conspiratorial whisper, “the night court takes you then and I mean they destroy you. They’re a select council of elders that keep close tabs on the vampires here. Not that there’s many, but they run a tight ship regardless. You’ll be seeing them soon enough. No new blood exists in London without them having an audience with the court and since you were done by an elder chances are that elder is a member of the court already, so it might not go over half bad for you.”

“What do you mean by an audience?”

"Think of it as an interview, to see if you have the mettle to survive. Really they just want to see how much trouble you’ll be, if you might break away and cause dissension where they don’t want it. Every night is like a bloody game of thrones episode with that lot, they’re always plotting against each other for gossip and power-real nasty shit. You’ve got to be careful who you talk to in the court or who the court sees you talking to, else they plan a coup on your ass right quick. They just do it because they’re bored really. To them the most entertaining way to spend eternity is by sticking a couple daggers in each other’s backs. They can’t even do it literally since we don’t die that easily. Just sunlight and fire for us.”  
Teague chuckles. “I think Jorin is the only one who managed to stir waves without them coming down on him, only because he’s an elder what used to be a member of the court. Also could be half the things he says goes right over everybody’s heads so they don’t much see the point in killing him, but what do I know?”

"Wait, wait.” Dan scrunches his eyes closed and shakes his head slowly. Processing all this information at once is more than he can handle tonight. Just to think vampires actually existed; that he was one now and they were all governed by an elite organization more obscure and convoluted than the spooks of MI-5 was a bit more than he could chew at once. “I don’t want to be involved with any-night court-or anything like that. I’m still coming to terms with me, with this…”

"I hear you,” Teague smiles not unkindly, “but you’ve got to be prepared. Sooner or later they’ll make you come to a decision about pledging allegiance to one of their own. It’s how it works. They make your life a living hell otherwise. You think you have the ability to say no to them, to just be on your way without being involved with the court, but they like to play, like to see the newer ones squirm so no one contests their power. The court has its hands in every bit of governmental pie you can think of. Some of them have been here since London was a medieval city with offal stinking at the gates. You like what you do, you like the job you got now? If you don’t play by the court’s rules they shut you down, make your work mean nothing, deny you any opportunity for advancement-because the new bloods don’t have any power to make a meaningful resistance and the elders have it too good to change the status quo.”

“Like a real vampire mafia,” Dan muses.

“Pretty much. They even control what goes in the papers to an extent. If one of our own goes off on a killing spree they cover it up so it only ends up as a side note in the Sun before its back to royal scandals and celebrity gossip. But you won’t have to worry about them for a while I suspect, only until the invitation comes to your house. Oh! Which reminds me, you’re going to be rethinking real estate I suppose.”

“What?”

Teague waves his hand impatiently, “You know, you can’t be living with your flatmate now, what’s he called-Phil, right? I like his videos too. The bit with the tea people had me in a riot.”

Dan moves away from Teague’s hand on his shoulder and stares. “What do you mean I can’t live with Phil? Is this some nightly council rule or-?”

“Night court,” Teague says,” and no, not a rule, they don’t much care who you shack up with or don’t. Even if they were afraid of you telling people what you were they would silence you before it made any significant splash in the news, not that anyone would believe it. Some vampires live with humans just fine actually, the hardest part is not making them a menu selection and with a new blood like yourself, unable to control the cravings and living with a human? You’d be mental to live with him. Unless you _want_ to kill him. I won’t fault you that. Had a flatmate used to leave toothpaste in the sink and the toilet unflushed-had horrible hygiene too, wouldn’t have minded giving him a reason to take some responsibility, but he smelled too horrible to bite.”

“I don’t want to kill him. I don’t want to kill anyone.”

Teague snorts. “Yeah and I wish I didn't have to take the tube to get around, but I do. Being a vampire isn’t all mist, glitter and turning into bats. If it were anything like the romantic films it’d be a dream, but it’s just the messy and violent parts without the flair. That’s what we are, mate, proper monsters with a bite. Sooner or later you’re going to bite something human and squirmy, give it a few, you’ll get there. Just don’t think you’d want your first attempt to be your friend.”

Dan hadn’t considered the considerable threat they now pose to each other, Phil as the mortal with blood he needed to survive and he the sudden predator taking up space in their home, hearing every heartbeat in Phil’s chest ticking down to what Teague suggested might be only the inevitable. They had been best friends through a myriad of ups and downs in their lives, tethered by stronger bonds than mere loyalty and now the greatest threat to that bond was him.

_I’ll never give up on us._ ” He couldn’t remember when he’d said it or what he was quoting, if it was a song or a passage in a book, he just remembered looking up from the laptop one day while seated in the lounge and having the urge to say it aloud to Phil who looked up from his seat at the table with a quizzical expression on his face. He remembered them both staring at each other until Dan had coughed and quickly looked back at his laptop to comment on a post and bypass the awkward silence of the moment. Phil had said nothing, but later, after some time passed, he’d stood up from his work on the table and silently padded over to where Dan was seated and placed a hand on his shoulder to ask if he wanted hot chocolate. There was nothing out of the ordinary with the question, not for Phil who always looked after house guests with a hospitable attention that Dan was never exempt from, but the hand on his shoulder lingered with comforting warmth through the fabric of his shirt, making him look up from the screen. Phil said nothing else, but gave him a fond look and a small smile that answered Dan’s previous statement more succinctly than any spoken words between them.

“Look, I’m not going anywhere. All this is…it’s strange and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it-I mean I’m a bloody vampire for christ’s sake,” Dan passes a hand over his face and exhales a shuddering laugh. “Yesterday I wasn’t and tonight I am and now there’s a night court and this hunger and suddenly I have a new learning curve to navigate-it’s mental. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right where I am.”

Teague stares for a while with a dark lingering look of concern, the kind of piteous consideration from someone who had once been where Dan was and made all the same mistakes. It gives Dan the impression Teague is much older than the boy he appears to be.  
“I understand,” Teague finally says. “Hey, it’s your life, you do what you want, but you have to be aware of the consequences and be prepared to choke on them. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I think I’m doing a fair bit of choking on consequences at the moment… What happens now?”

“Now? You go home and take cover to rest during the day. Take these with you.” Teague hands him the bag with the remaining containers. “What you drank tonight should be enough to tide you over, so these left overs should be alright for you to drink tomorrow until you figure out your plan of action. But listen- when you warm these up don’t put them in the microwave, it’ll scald the surface, leave a thick skin on top, burn the middle and leave the rest cold-just nasty business when you use the microwave. You’ve got to warm them up like you would a baby bottle, yeah? Or like making fondue. Just put it in a pot or a bottle and put that in the middle of a pot of boiling water and it’ll warm up like a dream. You can freeze them if you’ve got a big supply, but something like this you can put in the fridge, just make sure to not let them go old or it tastes disgusting. Worse than spoiled milk.”

“Can I just…survive on this then?” Dan holds the bag up. “Can I just drink these, without biting anyone?”

“Sure, but sooner or later you’ll be in a rut where you’re going to have to bite someone to tide you over. It gets easier when you can control your urges so you don’t drain the person and you can leave them alive after taking a couple sips.”

“You can- _we_ can do that?”

“Yeah, trick is deceiving the human in question so they don’t know they’re getting bit and that they don’t see your face while you’re doing it. Gives them a nasty shock otherwise.”

“My face…” Dan remembers his confrontation in the alley and how Lenny had paused and stared at him in abject terror.

“Like right now when you were drinking from that container, your eyes went black and your fangs were full on savage in your mouth, that’s how it is for all of us when the hunger is strong right before we feed. You’ve got to make people think they’re seeing something else. It’s like what you read about in vampire novels- they call it glamour or something like that, but it’s just a big mind fuck, innit? Nothing glamorous about it. You’ll get the hang of it eventually. It’s all in the way you look at a person- you stare at them, hold their attention and will them not to focus on anything else. You can’t control them though, this isn’t Doctor Who, but you just make them more susceptible to suggestion so they don’t notice you as much. For them looking at you will be like trying to focus on a magic eye puzzle on the back of a cereal box. A new blood like you won’t be able to do more than look slightly constipated if you try, but you’ll get it down pat eventually, that is if you want to avoid trouble.”

Dan remembers his encounter with Yilmaz and how it had been impossible to focus on the features of her face until the pivotal moment when she had revealed herself in the light as a gaunt creature with eyes like drowning pools of black ichor.

“For now, stick to the butcher’s,” Teague continues. “They shouldn’t give you much trouble. If they start asking too many questions tell them you’re making blood sausages or some shit and if they’re persistent it’s easy to move on to another shop. Big cities are great for variety. Don’t know how anyone can handle it outside the city limits. Sometimes I think the chupacabra’s just a hard up country vampire with a taste for live goat.”

“Right, you’re going to tell me that’s real too.”

Teague shrugs. “Nah. Maybe? Bloody hell, I don’t know, when I found about vampires actually existing it threw me for a loop and it still does even after four hundred years. Who knows what else is out there? I don’t want to think about it. You think we’ve discovered enough about our world, but it’s all deep ocean out there, there’s depth to everything and sometimes we get a glimpse of what’s lurking in the dark when it comes up to the surface, all dripping and monstrous.” 

Dan doesn’t want to address Teague’s age, it incites too many questions that are more unsettling than his attempts to grapple with the idea of being a vampire. If Teague had been around for four hundred years and wasn’t considered an elder, then how old were the members of the night court? And if he himself lived for that long it meant he would be around to see everyone he knew die, to see London change; to endure longer than all the generations of his family, to see the moment when Phil-he abruptly stops thinking before his mind can lead him down a path of darker thoughts than he can handle right now.

“What else can I do?” Dan flexes his hand, remembering the strength he had used against Lenny and Marcus; how he had tossed them like cloth dolls to the ground. “You mentioned the glamour and that we can’t die-“

“Oh we can die,” Teague says, “it’s just harder. Sunlight and fire are the main enemies. Someone takes off your head you’re done, but if it’s reattached to the neck quickly even that’s debatable.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not a bit. The blood we have is different. We heal quickly, at least that part in the movies is right. You lose a limb you can usually hold it in place and let the blood work at stitching your veins and tissues all back into the right place, like a lizard losing its tail, except we don’t grow a new one we can just reattach it. Absolutely wild I know,” Teague laughs as Dan stares at him in wide eyed incredulity, “but that’s what we are. You have to be careful with your strength too, else you’ll be taking doors off their hinges without meaning to or crushing fingers in a handshake or breaking ribs with a hug. You have speed, nothing like the movies though, you’re not going to go sonic on anyone anytime soon, but you _are_ fast and your endurance is better.”

_No more runs through the park to worry about at least,_ Dan thinks.

“You’ve also got the ability to see farther and hear better- again it’s not x-men quality, but your abilities are better than any human’s. All the perfected traits a predator needs in its habitat.”

“Predator...”

Teague nods and gives him a stern look. “If there’s anything you understand about this, you better understand what you are now, what you’re capable of doing. You’re raw and new. That hunger will be controlling you before you get a handle on it so you better learn that you’re made to hunt and made to kill. Don’t fool yourself otherwise. You don’t want to hurt anyone? You remember what you are and you learn to control it so it doesn’t control you. Or else the night court will find you and they’ll make it so you don’t have to worry about anything ever again.”

“Right,” Teague abruptly stands up, “that’s my part over- now the rest is up to you.”

Dan stands up and holds the bag with the containers close to his chest, fumbling for the right words to say before they part. In short order Teague had become a valuable life line to him when everything around him had been incomprehensible; Dan still wasn’t sure he comprehended the magnitude of what had happened to him or what promised to happen soon, but Teague’s small pep talk had helped considerably and his impending departure left Dan feeling cast adrift, alone and unsure.

“Ah, you’ll be fine, don’t look like that. I’m sure we’ll meet again and you’ll be looking better than you do now. I told you I had to go through the same thing once and look at me, four hundred years and counting.” Teague clasps his arm and nods at him. “Just go home, get some rest and think about what I said with your friend. You don’t want to leave, but you don’t want to hurt him either, one day you might have to think about which one is the lesser evil.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dan says, “but I’ll remember what you said, about everything. Thanks again for all this.”

“Don’t mention it. Oi, one more thing.” Teague turns back to him. “Do you know the name of the elder that did you? I might be able to give you some background info on them before you’re called to the night court so you know what to expect. Some of them are soft on their fledglings, very protective, even though they make them sort things out for themselves in the beginning.”

“Oh, she said her name was Yilmaz,” Dan says and all at once the look on Teague’s face crumples into something like horrified despair.

“Yilmaz?” Teague’s voice is a strangled gasp from his throat. “Ah, shit. Shit, shit, if I would have known-ah, shit, look mate, I got to go.” He looks around hurriedly in all directions while backing away from Dan, his hands held up in front of him as if to ward off a blow.

“But-“

“Nah, don’t talk to me. If anyone asks you, I never spoke to you. I never helped you. Good luck and all that.”

“Wait-!“ Dan calls after Teague but he runs off in a blur of speed to rival the fox’s panicked escape until he’s left alone on the pavement staring after the space Teague had inhabited only a few seconds ago as he tries to think why Yilmaz’s name alone was enough to make Teague beat a hasty retreat. The night has been long and exhausting, full of pitfalls and near disasters that don't leave him in a state of mind to mull anything over, instead he takes after Teague’s example to leave and make his way back home.

Home.  
He’s never felt more relieved in his life to think of the word and when the front door looms up on the horizon it’s all he can do not to rush over, kneel down on the stoop and kiss the floor mat. His keys are still in the back pocket of his jeans and he quickly fishes them out to unlock the door and makes his way up the stairs. A part of him wants Phil to have returned home from his parents and be there with his familiar presence and his worried questions, wants Phil to hear his tread and open the door to welcome him back, but there is no light under the door when he reaches the top of the stair, no sounds of anyone’s presence at all and when he finally opens the door to go inside everything is as dark and still as he left it.

As he makes his way down the hall to the kitchen to place the containers in the fridge as Teague had suggested he steps on the wadded up bundle of Phil’s socks he’d decided to leave on the floor. He stares at it in the dark, marveling over how well he could see in the shadows, every corner and inch of their flat delineated perfectly. Not quite night vision, but enough that he could comfortably see without the benefit of switching on a light. He steps over the socks and enters the kitchen to push the containers to the farthest corner of the fridge where Phil might not easily find them. He has a vision of Phil returning home, looking at the containers and opening them up in curiosity to find blood sloshing up to the brim. It’s a potential risk for questions he would like to avoid although he knows the most crucial questions of all, like his newfound permanent nocturnal habits, his absence at their once routine breakfasts and his careful avoidance will all be points of contention between them he doesn’t want to reflect on right now.

He’s tired and the night has progressed since his exit from the flower shop and his conversation with Teague. Morning will be approaching soon and he knows without the benefit of Teague’s warnings that he’ll have to find an appropriate place of refuge in the dark of his bedroom until the sun passes back into the safety of evening light. It’s not difficult to secure his windows with the blankets from his bed, effectively blocking all illumination from entering his room, but he adds a few more sheets to the barricade for good measure to prevent any light from seeping through unprotected crevices. It looks odd when he steps back to look at it, like he’s battening down for an apocalypse, which he supposes he is, now that his entire existence is at risk from the smallest drop of daylight. He remembers the excruciating pain he’d felt by accidentally placing his hand in a narrow shaft of sunlight when he’d awoken in the conservatory and knows a full beam falling on his body would be instantly catastrophic.

Without his blanket and sheets he’s forced to sleep on the bare mattress of his bed and he’s so tired he can’t be bothered to give a damn and totters forward with the intention of just collapsing onto it, but then he pauses and looks across the hall to Phil’s bed. The blanket there is blue and green and bright and cheerful and quintessentially Phil. Without another thought he strides over and yanks the blanket off the bed, spilling the pillows and Phil’s lion plush on to the floor, but he doesn’t pause to pick them up. Instead he gathers the blanket up into a bundle in his arms and retreats back to his room, carefully shutting the door behind him. He then allows himself to fall into a careless mess onto the bed, bundling the brightly colored blanket around him as he goes, curling up under its soft weight.

Phil’s blanket smells faintly of him, fresh and sweet and comforting. Dan bunches it in his hands and breathes in deep. Sleep takes him peacefully and he allows himself to drift in a temporary void where for a while everything is calm, everything is dark, everything is just him and the comforting reminder of someone he loves before the next evening brings new dilemmas he’ll have to face alone.

In the lounge his mobile buzzes with a text, the sixteenth from Phil, which simply reads: _I’m coming home._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The anime in question which Dan references in the conservatory is called Mushi-shi and the episode is, "Tender Horns."


	4. Black Holes...

> So what I'm trying to say is you should text me back.  
>  Because there's a precedent. Because there's an urgency.  
>  Because there's a bedtime.  
>  Because when the world ends I might not have my phone  
>  charged and  
>  If you don't respond soon,  
>  I won't know if you'd wanna leave your shadow next to mine.  
>  - _Marina Keegan, from the poem "Nuclear Spring_."

  


It’s the fourth time the old man has paced his way up the aisle to ask for the hour and once more, with patient alacrity, Phil responds that it is now half past eleven. Just as he has done since first approaching Phil, the old man shakes his head in solemn dissent, a frown lengthening the wrinkles along a face that could rival Keith Richard’s grizzled features as he tugs fretfully at his trench coat. The gabardine is faded and stained with dried splotches of mud that appear at first glance to be swathes of bronze patina brushed deliberately across the fabric. His entire appearance is travel worn and frayed with all the years of hard experience etched into the flaking leather of his shoes and the scar pocked knuckles of his hands.

There’s a story to him, Phil thinks. A story more vivid than anything he could imagine, although, whatever it is, Phil supposes that perhaps not even the old man himself remembers anymore if his constant need to ask for the time is any indication.

“No, Ollie, not the time, not the time.” The old man mutters and Phil is once again unsure if the man is speaking in the third person, in an aside to himself, or if he has decided to christen Phil with a new name altogether. Phil thinks asking for clarification either way would be a moot point.

 _Do I look like an Ollie_ , he wonders as the old man moves away and on to the next passenger in the row to repeat the same tremulous question.

“The time, please? The time, do you have the time?”

He has done this since entering the train carriage and Phil watches with concerned bemusement as he continues on his methodical task, asking for the time like a beggar pleading for alms. Despite the obvious disorientation he appears possessed of enough wherewithal to have purchased a ticket and find his way past the platform and onto the train. Some of the passengers nod as he passes by as if they’re used to his presence, a common anomaly of their routine commute to the city. Once he reaches the other end of the carriage, his list of potential respondents for the moment exhausted, he takes his seat and remains in place for a while, swaying to the motion of the train in exaggerated oscillations that threaten to dislodge the folded newspaper perched on his lap.

Despite being leagues apart in age and circumstance, Phil can’t help sympathizing with the old man or at least with his loss of time. Fatigue and stress have made it seem longer than two days since he left the flat for his family holiday. Seeing the newspaper with its bolded headline face up to announce the suspected suicide of a London florist, the first of any news he’s heard from the city since arriving at his parent’s house up North, gives him the disoriented sensation of an expat only just traveling back to their country of origin for the first time in years. He half expects to read some more startling apocalyptic announcement heralded in the stark font above the florist’s grainy photograph, but he can only just make out the smaller text of the lead which reads, ‘Shocking discovery by Lambeth Bridge-‘ before the rest is folded over and obscured. He knows what kind of news he’s subconsciously looking for, which name and face, and he’s glad he hasn’t seen either reflected in the bleak announcement on the old man’s newspaper

Bad news travels fast, his mother might have said if he had lingered long enough for her to offer adages or advice in an attempt to give him some hope, that if something had happened to Dan he would have known about it by now, not when a brief sighting by a fan was enough to incite an immediate avalanche of tweets and postings; but he finds it’s when news doesn’t arrive at all that makes him more ill at ease than if the calamity had immediately presented itself. At least then he could physically manage the parts of its devastation no matter how harrowed he might emerge after the ordeal, but in the meantime, as every text and phone call to Dan remains unanswered, the ride back to London becomes a gauntlet marked by a grating migraine and nagging presentiments that gnaw away at his resolve.

In any other circumstance he wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Dan could be unintentionally careless with responding in a timely manner to emails and texts, usually when his mind was too busy with projects and destinations and diversions more important than checking to make sure his phone was charged and present in his pocket; but when Dan had promised to text back and then lapsed into a prolonged insufferable silence that was uncharacteristic even at his most self-secluded, worry cast its roots into Phil’s mind with a relentless weight that had refused to go away.

His brother had picked up on his unease first, cutting right to the cause for his silence and intermittent glances at his phone with one offhand comment of, “Is Dan alright then?”

Phil hadn’t known what to say.

“Well, yes.” “He was.” “I’m not sure.” “Probably.” “Hopefully.” 

None of the answers sat right in his mouth and he had ended up saying nothing at all besides giving a curt nod in reply. The gesture seemed adequate enough to avoid more questions than he felt prepared to answer, but as the day had progressed and his distraction from all things familial had become more pronounced, his heart and mind straining to be elsewhere, he’d found himself being taken aside for a more private conversation outside the house as the late afternoon slipped into a brilliant sunset that had lit the clouds with red and gold.

“Sailor’s delight,” Phil had pointed out to his brother who offered a smile in return, the both of them aware that an ancient mariner’s rhyme was the last thing on his mind.  
In the brief interim of polite silence his brother offered before starting the conversation they both had known was only inevitable, Phil had wondered how different might his life have been had he inherited more of the athletic traits his brother possessed, if he had been less inclined to film and instead channeled his creativity into anything other than youtube, if he had never started a vlog with a grainy black and white camera in the small confines of his bedroom, if he had never met Dan and they had not gone on to make a career, a home and a life together- how different would it all have been or would there still have been a future with him standing shoulder to shoulder with his brother looking over a horizon set ablaze by dying beams of sunlight while worrying over the fate of a best friend in a city miles away?

The idea had been too overwhelming for him to think about. He could barely dedicate himself to the task of focusing on time spent with family let alone dissect the meandering what if’s of a future where he might have been known as anyone other than amazingphil. It was only important that he was here now and that Dan had disappeared without explanation.

They’d stood there, listening to the last trill of birdsong before the daylight faded, until the silence had segued on to the subject which had become the elephant in the room between them for the entire day.

“It’s really not alright is it?” His brother had looked askance at him and this time Phil had shook his head with a hesitancy meant to say, no, it really wasn’t alright, but who knows why.

“I thought so. You have that same occupied thousand yard stare on your face as you did when you asked me about the difference between girls and boys. Remember?”

“Yes, actually. I think I’m still slightly traumatized at the mental image you gave me.”

His brother had laughed. “Maybe, but you looked less concerned after you cleared up the truth. You never were one to let anything go when you were interested in something, especially if you didn’t know exactly the reasons why or how something worked. I think that’s what’s happening here, you don’t know what’s happened and until you do you won’t let it rest. If it was just a row you wouldn’t look like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re missing something important and you don’t know where it is.”

“That’s-“ A surge of déjà vu had stolen the next words from his mouth and for a moment he could only stare, feeling all the world like the child he’d once been trying to play catch up with his older more knowledgeable sibling. He couldn’t help wondering just how much of his thoughts could be read on his face that his brother could have so easily diagnosed his feelings with nothing more than a look. 

“How do you know it’s not just a row?”

“Live long enough with someone, especially when they’re family and you pick up on the small things that matter. And Dan matters to you. To us too. He’s been a part of this family ever since you introduced him to us. In your place I’d probably be just as worried.”

Phil had faltered for a reply, meaning at first to retort with a denial of his brother’s assumption or attempt a light turn of humor to take the edge off the conversation, but at the last second before speaking he’d realized both were thin attempts to dissimulate how concerned he truly felt. There was nothing left to say, not when what he needed most was encouragement to do exactly what they both knew he’d been thinking about all along and in the end he’d remained silent and let his brother continue.

“Go home, make sure everything _is_ alright. It’s only a train ride away and we’ll all still be here. If it’s nothing- and with any luck it probably is- just come back. And if it’s something-” he’d paused and placed a hand on Phil’s shoulder. “We’ll come to you.”

Early the next day Phil had followed suit with no small amount of guilt at cutting their reunion plans short, saying goodbye to his parents with a rush of stilted explanations that only left his mother looking more worried and confused than he already felt, but he could barely explain the hasty decision to leave to himself.

How to explain that he was bid on by nothing but a gut feeling, something irrational and inexplicable, but powerful enough to make him leave anyway? 

He supposed his mother might only take it in stride after having guided him through a childhood in which he’d continually defied explanations by offering her valentine’s stones of questionable origins and once wanting to flatten himself with a pinboard to become two dimensional. Over the years he’d embraced the naiveté of his youth, developing it into a keen creativity used to fuel a successful career that at times seemed too extraordinary and impossible to have ever happened at all. From a camera cereal box prize to a subscriber turned best friend- all of it strings of coincidences and fateful decisions borne from a singular urge, a yearning desire to create, to act on his dreams and form a world of his choosing out of a grand impetus without any promise of success or the guarantee that anyone would find him worth watching or listening to.

It had been a reckless plunge, another impulsive act without explanation save for the need to press forward. The sensation currently pulling every nerve of his body towards London however feels nothing like blind impulse, but a force and a feeling greater than his ability to define. He wondered if there was a word to describe it, this sensation of freefall without ever hitting bottom, an ill premonition without evidence to sustain it, worming through his thoughts, urging him towards home.

For all the similarities between himself and Dan, for how well they coincided in creativity, humor and interests, Phil allowed intuition to guide him whereas Dan’s thoughts usually coalesced through rounds of meticulous reasoning that would go on to feature as introspective commentary in many of his videos. A difference of thought processes between them that never clashed in detrimental ways and most often only when Phil insisted on swiping newly purchased shoes off the table.

“It’s just a superstition.” Dan would laugh until Phil pointed out that his fear of trees and the dark could be called the same.

He knew the habit was strange, rooted in tradition he found hard to break like baseball players perpetually avoiding the foul line, but life itself could be strange and inexplicable and sometimes it felt easier to sort out the unpredictability of it all into something more manageable even if the solutions to certain ingrained fears were just as inexplicable themselves. A grain of salt over the shoulder to warn against evil, waving to magpies to negate the bad luck of seeing them, keeping new shoes off the table to keep calamity and disaster at bay- in essence none of it made sense and if asked Phil would say he didn’t abide by any manner of superstition as he believed it was all just one slippery slope to finding illuminati signs in everything from music videos to burnt toast. A pair of trainers on the table was rude but hardly disastrous, just as butterflies could hardly be blamed for starting hurricanes, but somewhere deep inside where a subconscious whisper echoed, ‘what if,’ after so many years of abiding by the habit, Phil thought it altogether harmless. It was a quirk Dan had understood, placing all new purchases on the floor without further argument in the same way Phil understood his aversion to darkened hallways, the both of them placidly conceding to each other’s coping strategies under the guise of wanting to avoid an unknown calamity, no matter how strained the possibility.

With a whirlpool of unbidden thoughts swirling about his head and no way to cope or quell them, Phil wishes Dan were here now to reason that his intuition is off this time, that his worry is unnecessary, that nothing is wrong and the small bloom of panic welling at the back of his mind with more worse case scenarios than he can possibly stomach in one sitting is merely the product of an over tired mind that only managed two hours of sleep last night.

On the heels of that thought he immediately thinks that of course if Dan were here; if Dan had answered his texts; if Louise hadn’t answered the phone to say that everything was fine and no she hadn’t heard from Dan after their get-together, he wouldn’t be sitting in a train bound for London with his heart in his mouth and a thudding pulse high in his throat he’s almost sure everyone seated around him can hear.

All at once he’s back at the beginning, alone in a small blue green wallpapered bedroom that would one day find its echo in iconic bedcovers, speaking to an audience not yet multiplied beyond the conservative few thousand who used to watch him. Everything feels as it was when he first began to answer Skype calls from a viewer named Daniel whose laughter and conversation melded perfectly with his, who was possessed of a personality stirring with conviction and compassion and careful adoration that made him wish they could meet in person; that they could spend a weekend together without the threat of interruptions, but circumstances then had kept them at an impasse, apart from each other and that distinct feeling of separation and frustration crowds back to Phil with a vengeance, only now, whatever was keeping Dan away wasn’t the price of a train ride up North or familial restrictions, but something with darker overtones of menace too nebulous for Phil to comprehend.

“Hmm, what’s that then? I see…”

The old man’s voice interrupts Phil’s thoughts and he watches the furrowed face take on a look of distant contemplation as the old man glances down at his paper and back up at the ceiling of the train carriage as if listening to a person only he can see. After another few seconds of consideration he abandons any interest for current events in favor of carrying on an animated conversation with the empty space of air in front of him.

“There is very little time left for these things to be accomplished, these important things you understand. Yes…yes..in time everything goes. Had a Velocette before the war, but it didn’t last long. Nothing lasts. Such little time for the important things. Yes…yes…no time you see.”

The rest of his rasped murmur is lost between the sibilant creak and sway of steel rushing along the tracks until it fades out into a whisper Phil can no longer hear. Despite the few interested glances cast in his direction the old man is treated with polite indifference, just another innocuous curiosity of public transport, no more offensive than the rest of the passengers with their own quirks and oddities neatly hidden beneath a veneer of well-balanced composure before the train deposited them back into the spaces of their personal lives.

The old man’s journey up the aisle had provided Phil with a strange but welcome interlude, better than looking at his phone and being reminded of the strange silence which greets every attempt to communicate with Dan. He’s left now with the task of finding something else to occupy his mind, anything unrelated to worrying about things outside of his control, but the Stephen King novel he’d packed remains in the suitcase he accidentally left by the bench on the station and his mobile with its gallery of apps makes the small grumble of anxiety howl to a peak as he waits to be interrupted by a text from Dan that never arrives. The next best form of diversion available lies in the figures of the passengers seated around him, but he considered ‘people watching’ to be an acceptable exercise only when seated in a Parisian outdoor café and even then, surreptitiously.

The unstated rule and rote for traveling via mass transit was an anti-social exercise in keeping to one’s self at all times, a lesson Phil had quickly learned upon first encountering the rush time herd of Londoners filling the underground to overcapacity in a competitive dash to get everywhere at once and not bother with anyone around them in the process. Dan had seemed right at home in the environment, quickly losing himself in the world of his phone so that Phil usually had to lean over and nudge him to catch his attention as their stop arrived. Trains, Phil knew, were not optimal sources of welcome social interaction, but in the wake of his restless apprehensions, he sees no harm in allowing mild curiosity to give way to idle distraction as he briefly takes in the crowd of strangers sharing his ride back to London.

He sees the usual suspects of public transport, those of nondescript attire, individuals in formal suits bound for office cubicles and students bound for university dorms with backpacks crowding their laps, all of them easily overlooked, save for a few passengers which notably stand out from the crowd.

Of these include a woman in a flowery house dress seated in the row across from him making small hushing murmurs to the swaddled infant in her arms in an attempt to waylay its burbles of distress from becoming a long-winded wail of a complaint. Despite her efforts the portly man dressed in business attire seated next to her glares at both mother and child, complementing his looks with intervals of pointed sighing to evince his displeasure. Phil mentally dubs him ‘Frustrated Joe,’ for his irate demeanor and the way he continually checks his wristwatch and glances at the floor with a scrunched up frown as if trying to compel the train to move faster along its route by force of will alone. His flushed appearance becomes more livid with every moment that passes until he begins to resemble a boiled lobster and Phil begins to worry that if the veins in his forehead become any more prominent they might pop. Even the old man in his fugue of senility had bypassed the man along his interrogative route, subconsciously repelled by the anger radiating off of him.

Phil’s not sure why the man is so aggravated. _‘Important business meeting he needs to attend? Late for a surprise birthday party? An incredible need to wee?’_

Whichever it was, Phil hoped the man arrived wherever he needed to before he suffered an aneurysm.

Two girls sat further down in the opposite row lean close together, unconcerned with ‘Frustrated Joe’ or any of the other passengers on the train, the both of them lost to their own world of diversion. Their heads remain bowed over a phone one of them is holding, engrossed in a game overtaking the screen with a dazzling display of colorful flashing lights. Occasionally one of them sucks their teeth or laughs at the events playing out in the game before settling back into silent concentration.

As Phil glances at the girls, with a small stretch of imagination he can see himself and Dan mirrored there. It’s less about their appearance, how the girl on the right resembles him with her short cropped fringe and brightly colored tee emblazoned with small foxes or the dark brown brunette seated next to her with a half smirk and black top and jeans that brings Dan to mind; but more in the way they lean towards each other without thinking like two plants finding bits of sunlight in the other’s presence, displaying the casual intimate concordance all good friends share when their personalities synced effortlessly.

It’s only then he registers Dan’s absence with painful urgency, thinks on how if he were here, he would break this uncomfortable silence with bawdy humor and wit, effortlessly turning an otherwise hectic journey into something far more pleasant to withstand.

Phil enjoyed company and good company best of all, the kind when he didn’t have to overthink every word that fell from his mouth or wonder if the other person was only withstanding his presence with a bare amount of tolerance. With Dan there had never been any question, the assurance of his attention had become a point of commonality between them that promised whether on his own or in a room full of people he didn’t know, he would never be alone and he thinks it had to do with how Dan’s presence felt like completing a circuit; how the world felt a little more intact and enjoyable when they rose to meet it together.

As far as he knew, upon arriving home, Dan would still be there as he always was, browsing the computer or working on plans for a video or poring over e-mails for collaborative projects they might be interested in. In any other circumstance he wouldn’t have given Dan’s absence from social media a second thought as he could be unthinkingly careless with responding in a timely manner to emails and texts, usually when his mind was too busy with projects and destinations and diversions more important than checking to make sure his phone was charged and present in his pocket. Mistakes happened, sometimes texts were overlooked and they hardly fired off messages to each other every waking minute of the day, but when Dan had promised to text back after briefly stepping out and then lapsed into a prolonged insufferable silence that was uncharacteristic even at his most self-secluded, Phil thought something had to be wrong. The idea was only reinforced when his string of concerned texts remained unanswered.

London was a sprawling monolith of intersecting train lines and avenues easy to become lost in even for a veteran resident. Many times before, a good time after he should have been better acquainted with the underground, Phil had exited a station to find himself in completely the opposite direction from where he’d meant to go which usually found him consulting a map of train lines that at first glance looked no better than tangled yarn. At night, one wrong turn could lead to a less savory encounter than having to ask someone for directions. Major cities and crime went hand in hand and London was no exception. With Dan unaccounted for the possibilities for what could have happened play out in exhaustive detail in Phil’s mind.

He’s lost to his thoughts again, looking off into a middle distance which is unfortunately focused on the girls, a fact he’s only aware of when the girl who’d reminded him of Dan ducks her head and catches him staring.

She straightens up, squares her shoulders and levels a cold unblinking glare that is not at all like Dan who, when even at his most sullen or irritated, doesn’t nearly resemble the ferocious threat the girl displays.

At first, when his eyes refocus he believes she’s recognized him from his videos and he offers a smile of unreserved geniality until he registers the suspicious unamused expression of her face. Public transport, he remembers, is brimming with its own share of unseen threats and dangers, both of which he’s unwittingly embodied in the space of a few minutes by his fixed unblinking stare. Explaining he wasn’t really staring at her or that she somewhat resembles a close friend of his would probably go over about as well as offering a fizzy cola bottle in a makeshift peace offering and he decides it better to look away quickly, but even as he exchanges his line of sight for the view past his window he can still feel her glare like the buzz of an angry hornet hovering over his skin before she slowly turns her attention back to the friend at her side.

 _Nice one, Phil._ He can almost hear Dan’s laugh in his head.

 _I really need to stop doing that_ , he thinks and isn’t sure if he means to stop staring or to stop making Dan the nexus of every errant thought.

He quickly reconsiders his decision to not look at his phone and rummages around for it in an effort to look busy and not at all like the instigator the girl must believe him to be. Unexpectedly, as he fumbles around his pockets he comes upon a small pack of milkybar buttons first. It’s a lucky find and one he wastes no time opening to savor. It’s not an instant salve for his troubled thoughts or the migraine compressing his head, but as the taste melts along his tongue it gives him something far more pleasant to focus on. It’s a distraction that will only last until the bag is empty and he decides to take his time and indulge in every piece.

Meanwhile, the low murmurs of conversation taking place around him provide a comfortable level of noise he could easily tune out while looking at the view speeding past the carriage windows in a blur of cloudy sky and terraced houses on a horizon that becomes progressively more urban and less open the closer they get to the city, but the conversation taking place a few seats down from him, between two men dressed in low slung jeans and dark jerseys with snapback caps skewed on their heads, is harder to ignore. 

It’s a loud, omnipresent discussion that forces everyone to listen and challenges anyone to protest. The passengers are all doing their best in training their ears and eyes away, but Phil has the idea it’s a hard fought battle they’re all currently losing.

The two are exchanging anecdotes about a house party gone ‘completely mental’ according to the assessment of one of the men who proceeds to detail his sexual conquests in more detail than Phil believes he should otherwise be subjected to. Every other sentence is punctuated with a blur of exuberant hand gestures, fingers twisting the air in a raunchy pantomime to illustrate positions, foreplay techniques and squeezed body parts. Phil expects ‘Frustrated Joe’ to make a scathing remark and unleash his pent up wrath on them both, but he does nothing more than glower before once again focusing his attention between the woman seated next to him and the ticking hands of his wristwatch.

Phil continues to endure the boisterous conversation up until the moment he hears: ‘Bruv, her snatch was tight as all fuck! Aw, it was liquid sex! Classic Essex girl, good for one thing only, but god she does it well. I’m telling you, right- little slag jumped my bones soon as I walked out the kitchen. Wrapped those legs around me and went to work so hard I woke up the next day numb from the waist down. Shit, she was savage. She was filthy like-‘

Before he can hear the end to the crude simile Phil abruptly decides now might be the best time to don his headphones and allow Muse to drown out the noise around him.

The world of the train and its passengers abruptly recedes into muffled silence until the track he’s selected begins to play. On the heels of the rising hum of the bass line and the steady beat of drums preceding Matt Bellamy’s lilting falsetto the men become unimportant players in a silent film Phil is no longer a part of as he drifts along, comfortably lost in the scenery rushing past his window and the thrum of music seeping in to fill the spaces that anxiety and worry have hollowed out in his mind.

For a moment the music is enough, but between the gaps of silence in changing tracks and fading songs his subconscious continues to impose.

_What happened that night? Where is he? Is he alright? What if I’m wrong and everything is fine? What if it’s not? What if-?_

As soon as he’s done forming one question another rises to the fore, followed by another and another in quick succession, until it overwhelms the music in his ears with an aggravated symphony of open-ended questions that neither the music nor his bag of sweets can subdue. He’d like to turn his thoughts off completely, reset his mind back to a point of reasonable calm as efficiently as using system restore on a computer and think of nothing at all.

“ _Rasāsvāda._ ”

The word occurs to Phil without preamble and he remembers Dan saying it one day while he sat editing a video, frustrated with certain graphical elements which had refused to pull together as he’d envisioned. The more he’d focused the less it seemed he was accomplishing anything at all, until Dan had appeared behind him with an abruptness that made him jump in his seat.

“Sorry, what now?”

“Bliss in the absence of all thought, according to a tenet of Indian philosophy anyway. Just read about it the other day.” Dan had replied, rummaging through a bag of crisps while looking over Phil’s shoulder at the stalled attempts to edit. “It’s supposed to be the core of what meditation strives for. Just this idea of being able to drop all your worries, get out of your head for a bit or further into it, to a point where you can drift along, bothered by nothing, focusing on nothing, just ‘being’-if that makes any sense.” 

He’d thoughtfully crunched away on a mouthful of crisps and held the bag aloft for Phil to dip a hand inside and take a few for himself. “Then again, it also apparently means a kind of pleasure derived from sipping juice so I suppose you could down glasses of Ribena at long intervals to achieve the same effect. Sounds nice, doesn’t it, being able to disconnect at will and just ‘recharge’ in the absence of anything else to distract you? Sometimes I think I could get a lot more done that way.”

“I think it would take a gallon of Ribena at this point to achieve- uh, what you said. Although a short break with a snack or a mug of coffee might help to clear my mind a bit.”

Bliss in the absence of all thought.

At the time Phil had thought it a practice that worked better in theory. How could anyone just stop thinking? Might as well say to stop breathing. There was always something to think about, a brilliant idea to write down, a spontaneous melody to compose or a game to plan for their radio show. Thought was the mainstay of his career, an action rooted in instinct, just like caring about a loved one, especially their unexplained absence.

 _It could be nothing_ , he thinks, _but it feels too much like something and I need to know. I’d rather be there to know for certain it’s nothing, because if something’s gone wrong and I’m not there-if I could have been there to help him and I didn’t go…_

His thoughts trail away, unsure what it is he means to do when he arrives if there is a crisis to confront. A part of him feels ill-suited to the task as if he were a child again and not someone with a successful career and a degree and a history of videos to his name that proved he was as prepared and capable as anyone else. However, managing a career was one thing; dealing with a critical situation was another. His knowledge of administering care limited itself to plasters for scrapes and comfort food for long weekends in; small meaningful gestures to mend emotional hurts and heartfelt words or laughter to boost someone’s day. In the event of a more unpredictable crucial disaster what could he possibly do to help?

 _Just be there with him_ , he thinks, _]to be there for him. Somehow. Any way I can until it’s resolved._

When all else failed, sometimes presence alone was enough. It’s a belief he’s not sure is entirely sound, but with little else by way of reassurance, it’s one that provides a small comfort.

Clouds roll past in the afternoon sky, lazy drifting specks of overcast grey where he would let his imagination settle for a time in relative peace, spin the passengers of the train into a colorful narrative for another idiosyncratic video, but the optimist in him is too harried to make any light of the situation. The migraine tangles along his skull like barbed wire and any paracetamol he might otherwise use to quell it is somewhere in a cabinet in a home that has never felt further away.

 _Rasa-What did Dan call it again? Rasāsvāda._ He remembers and closes his eyes and tries to sleep.

For a time he’s aware only of his thoughts churning about his head like small buzzing wasps he wishes he could just shake his head vigorously to dislodge. Even past his closed eyelids the world remains in sharp focus, too grating and harsh for him to drift comfortably into any semblance of rest no matter how hard he tries, but presently, between the rocking motion of the train and the lull of the music in his ears, true darkness overtakes him, a velvet soft place where his mind surrenders into a hesitant truce.

The dream begins in the usual fashion, with Phil unaware he’s dreaming at all, not even when the large tawny cat on the floor lashes its tail and turns to meow at him in a human voice laced with the guttural burr and thickly stressed vowels of a Geordie accent.

“Why, gan on then. Howay, man. Howay.”

“I can’t go any faster! These are heavy, you know.” Phil does his best to grapple with the two large garbage bags held in each hand as he shuffles his way to the bin area down a corridor becoming darker and dingier with every step he takes.

The cat rolls its eyes and tosses its whiskers in a way that, coupled with its accent, Phil would find comical if not for the portentous size of its battle scarred head and yellowed falcate claws which warn against anyone taking it lightly. It turns away to continue on their route, its white tipped tail weaving serpentine shapes of aggravation behind its back.

 _Like a less cheery version of the Cheshire cat. Wonder if catnip might put it in a better mood_ ,he thinks. _Ball of yarn maybe? Looks like it would sooner eat the yarn than play with it though. Maybe it just needs a good lie down to put it in a better mood. That always helps me._

After another minute of flustered breathing while trying to keep pace with his feline companion, Phil takes time to realize the bin area where he’s headed looks similar to the one in their old residence in Manchester, a dimly lit foreboding space where he’d felt more like he was visiting the ravaged town of Silent Hill than simply putting the garbage out for disposal. The passing resemblance to either Manchester or Silent Hill however gradually fades as the shadows grow denser and the path unravels from grey concrete into loose rocks and black dirt.

“Hold on, you’re going too fast!” He calls ahead to the cat who does little more than toss its head in exasperation, never once breaking stride or slowing down. It’s a struggle to keep his footing as gravel slips and slides beneath his feet and beads of sweat begin to dot his brow, plastering strands of hair across his forehead, half blinding him as he shakes the rumpled shape of his fringe from his eyes for what seems like the thousandth time. The effort soon proves to be a lesson in futility and he thinks if he has to shake his head like a waterlogged dog one more time he’ll have his hair shorn off into a buzz cut.

 _Or maybe styled up into a more manageable quiff. I’m not quite ready for a military look just yet, no matter how annoying this is_ , he muses as he blows air upward to dislodge a strand of hair tickling his nose.

“Too fast, the man says. Yer reet slow, marra. You plodging along like that, time will run out.” The cat continues to lope off into a horizon quickly disintegrating into an indiscernible void that Phil would otherwise be wary to enter, but with no other destination in mind and no other company in the growing dark, he follows after, arms pulled down and out to his sides like an ambling penguin as he tries to evenly distribute the weight of the bags and negotiate for purchase along the slippery ground.

“Do I at least get some toast when I’m done with this?”

There is a pause in which Phil swears he hears the cat mutter, ‘workyticket, that one.’

“No, you don’t get toast,” it says aloud. “No time for bait, hardly any time left at all now. How, man, keep on faffin about you’ll be knobbled with nobody but yersel to blame.”

 _Very easy to say for someone with four legs to hurry along on and nothing to carry. A little help would be nice_ , he thinks and doesn’t pause to consider that a cat, no matter how large or articulate, would be of little use in his current situation or that any promise of toast is about as strange a prize as venturing off into a silhouette of nothingness with the sole intention of throwing out garbage.

It’s a task he considered onerous at the best of times and now he’s only reminded of why. The smell coming from the bags is terrible and every step makes them jostle wetly at his sides like overripe fruits set to burst. He would prefer to get rid of them as soon as possible, but the path is too treacherous to navigate quickly and the cat, his ersatz guide, has no qualms about leaving him behind.

“Wait!"

When he calls out again the cat finally pauses and turns its head slowly to peer back over its shoulder. It rolls its eyes once more, but this time when they go up into its head they remain there, the whites of the sclera permanently replacing the green irises for a slack dead eyed expression.

Startled, Phil pulls up short to stare and the bags slip from his hands onto the ground with a wet smack that splits them open, immediately releasing a fetid odor of rot and brine.

“ _He’s_ waiting now. No time, no time,” the cat says and when it turns back to the void ahead of them Phil remains fixated, watching as its form is quickly swallowed up into shadow.

“Well, that was…odd.”

He’s not sure what to do now. With the ruins of his failed task on the ground his only two options revolve around staying or leaving, the first of which is quickly running its course into the realm of impossible as the stench of the bags at his feet continues to rise into an unendurable miasma. Without the cat to guide him however, he’s unsure of venturing off alone

“Phil, you can’t just stand there all day. Move. It’s fine. Don’t be scared.”

His subconscious assumes the shape of Dan’s voice, an amused, encouraging lilt that reminds him to breathe and to try and after a moment of shaky hesitation he does.

The cat’s paw prints dot the ground ahead of him, the best signposts he has to lead him forward, but in the encroaching darkness they quickly disappear from view, until the shadows become dense enough that he’s barely able to discern the shape of his hand in front of his face. If there are any turnoffs or sudden drop-offs he realizes he would never be able to see them, not without a torch to guide him. He carefully shuffles forward, mindful that every step he takes leads him further into what might just be an unnavigable maze. The thought alone is enough to disorient him, especially in the absence of any distant speck of light or a cool draft of wind to promise an end to the dark path at all. In waking life, whenever he became lost, he at least had the benefit of his mobile’s gps, street signs or a security guard to guide him; here, there is nothing and no one to offer assistance and it is this quality of forced exilement and bleak solitude that begins to nudge his thoughts with the disquieting notion that this ‘dream’ may in fact only be the prologue to a nightmare. It’s a passing thought which quickly recedes back into the dormant quarters of his subconscious as he continues to blindly proceed, concerned now with only leaving the stygian environs which appear all too real.

“Back to the wall,” he recalls Dan’s bemused advice during one playthrough of a horror game and decides it’s the sagest decision he can make when all other options seem null.

He ventures on and extends one hand out in a wary inspection of the wall to his left side. It yields a cool uneven rock face covered in an oily substance that clings to his skin and slips uncomfortably between his fingers. He’s not sure what it is, whether it might be algae or something far more offensive. The smell rising from the stones is cloying and metallic, like pennies grasped in a sweaty palm, noxious in a way that’s enough for him to be almost grateful for the darkness and not see what it might actually be.

 _Er-maybe I won’t keep my back to the wall after all_ , he thinks.

His fingertips barely graze the wall as he tries to follow its border without touching the stones, but occasionally a prominent edge of rock juts out of place, smearing his palm with more unpleasant liquid that he quickly wipes away on his jumper with a muttered noise of disgust. A questing touch to his opposite side confirms another rough expanse of slick crenelated stone creating two narrow earthen walls which extend off into an immeasurable distance.

It brings to mind a creepypasta Dan had showed him once, about a spelunker who had excavated a small hole in a cave system, uncovering odd artifacts and unsettling sounds while meticulously logging the entire venture complete with photos to sell the tale. Phil had thought it eerie at the time for how detailed and elaborate it was until by the end of it he was hard-pressed to determine if it truly was just fiction or an actual account. In the shadows of the dream, his conscious mind asleep and unable to rationalize his fears, the story begins to filter through his thoughts and provide a sinister backdrop to the stygian environs around him, ushering up noises from the path ahead which assure him he is not alone.

Hushed whispers gather to disturb the silence as if a crowd of people were muttering about him, but what exactly is the object of their disapproval or concern evades his best attempts to listen. Just when he thinks he’s picked up the thread of conversation the voices fade off and waver into distorted gibbers that echo off the walls in a disarray of acoustics that at times appear to come from somewhere just behind his shoulder and at other times resound from a great distance away.

He had read that sometimes the sound of water underground could reverberate off the stones in ways that sounded like voices. It’s a thought he wants to believe, that the sounds are just a mixture of water and acoustics gone awry and not something actually inhabiting the darkness with him.

He thinks of what manner of creatures might be stalking the shadows, if perhaps scuttling bats or wolves or feral cats less eloquent and more vicious than the one he’d just spoken with might take offense at his presence and he decides to scuff his soles along the floor as he walks in an effort to avoid a startled confrontation that might make things worse.

_]Better they know I’m here than catching them unawares. Whatever ‘they’ are. If there’s anything there at all to begin with. If it’s not just my imagination building up horrors more terrifying than it actually is._

A memory comes to mind of Dan mentioning something similar of envisioned monstrosities being greater than the sum of their actual presence after they’d finished a horror film in which the revealed menace had fallen short of their expectations. The anticlimactic aura of disappointment between them had only prompted Dan to offer his own critical review of the film as it had faded to black on their television screen.

“Half of us are more afraid of not knowing what’s there than the actual thing itself. We could probably hang ourselves on our own imaginations; then you toss in a creature that looks like the bad end of a Stan Winston dump heap and it’s just like-oh- well, that’s a disappointment.” Dan had gestured at the screen for emphasis.  
“Sometimes the details are subtle enough to have the most impact and other times it’s trying too hard, like a cheesy ghost train that’s all sirens and broken animatronics-no substance. You have to find a balance between the showing and the telling. I mean if I were filming it I’d build up the suspense more, play into the atmosphere, there’s just so many details you have to be mindful of.”

“Alright, Spielberg.”

“No, really. Listen.” Dan had ignored Phil’s gentle laughter and leaned over to snatch the remote from the couch and mute the soundtrack playing over the credits as he spoke. “Lackluster monsters aside, this just reminds me I’d like to direct something one day. Our lives already revolve around filming, right? Setting the tone, pacing each moment and creating something satisfying for us to spend time on in the first place-it’s not inconceivable we could direct something on a grander scale. You already have enough ideas for a dozen scripts with your vibe of David Lynchian surreality to help it along.”

“David Lynch.” Phil had smirked. “I think that’s just a fancy way of saying strange.”

“Which is Lynch’s middle name and he has a slew of award nominations for the trouble. Although granted, maybe he’s too intense for the comparison. Coen Brothers then or…no one at all really. Just you. Distinctly Phil Lester.”

They’d glanced at each other, held the look for the barest of moments, just enough for Phil to see the expression on Dan’s face which for all its wry humor looked ardently sincere, before Dan had quickly turned back to the screen.

“I’m just trying to say we’ve already had years of experience with a platform that’s ideal for presenting whatever we decide to do next with it. When I get the chance to do a short film or a documentary, something a bit more involved than filming myself against a green screen in the house, I’ll make something like that.” He’d gestured at the credits slowly rolling past. “Maybe not horror, maybe not even a feature length film, but something that I’d be proud of- something imaginative, memorable and good.”

"You will."

" _We_ will. I think we already have the last part down."

There are quiet moments sometimes in between what Dan says and doesn’t say, when he wants to say more than he’s otherwise prepared to until his thoughts on the matter are arranged just so, to leave nothing of misinterpretations between them, but the sentiment there needs no further clarification. It is full of satisfaction, unabashed contentment over having made the choice to continue with their strange and unconventional careers together and Phil had smiled at him, this time making the point to stare, to catch and hold Dan’s gaze with a silence that had said, 'me too.'

He’d also wondered if maybe all this talk was just a subtle tactic on Dan’s part to dissuade himself from thinking about the supernatural creature in the film while in the silence of his bedroom trying to sleep. There’d been something vaguely endearing about that idea and Phil had decided to tease the conversation towards that subject to see Dan’s reaction.

“So, with what you were saying before, is that why you have that thing about trees and the dark? Being more afraid of not knowing what’s there than the thing itself?” Phil had feigned nonchalance while picking out the last kernels of popcorn from the bowl in his lap.

Dan had given a coughing mutter of a laugh, in which Phil could almost hear the implied warning of ‘don’t start with me,’ before going on to reply.

“It’s just the idea that there could be anything, something you’re not prepared for. It sounds ridiculous, but in the moment adrenaline overtakes the rational and since it’s impossible to prove otherwise until you’re attacked and it’s too late anyway, that residual fear remains. Suddenly the most unassuming objects pose the biggest threat, especially in the dark when you can’t see them or what might be hiding behind them. I think that’s probably why slenderman still has that aura of terror about it so long after the fact of everyone having played the game. It’s this creature of unknown origin and indistinct features just lurking silently in the shadows and the only warning you ever get of its presence is when it’s close enough to kill you. Bloody terrifying really. But it’s like what I said before, when sometimes the simplest designs yield the greatest impact.”

Phil had thought this true enough; his fear of deep waters unnerved him to the core with little but his own imagination to blame. It was unsettling to think about the leagues of unexplored depths that might house any manner of undiscovered marine monstrosities. In an unmapped ocean where enough zoological oddities already existed, anything at all could lurk there. Watching documentaries trying to find elusive giant squid that had left their marks embedded on the backs of whales, only made the idea more disturbing and usually left him searching for cooking shows to watch instead where the only frightful thing to encounter was a contestant chef breaking down into their failed bowl of pasta.

He could hardly blame Dan for feeling ill at ease in the dark. Many times before in filming the supernatural segment of their old super amazing project they’d managed to effectively spook themselves by doing nothing more than talking about unusual events while in the darkened confines of their own bathroom. Somehow the echo of their voices in the dark with nothing but the small torchlight of their phones bouncing off the mirror with a distorted glow was enough to make them hurry through the filming process so they could rush to turn on the light again. Despite having equal part in this irrational fear Phil had continued to press the point to see how much he could get away with before Dan caught on.

“Maybe we should buy a few nightlights and set them around the flat for when you need to shut off the lights when we go to bed? But no, then that might attract moths.”

They’d both paused, Phil adopting his best deadpanned expression while trying to fight back laughter under Dan’s withering stare until he’d found himself unceremoniously shoved sideways into the sofa cushions.

The memory is so potent and welcoming, a sharp contrast to the bleak tunnel around him, that the scene almost shifts to the lounge with Dan by his side, compelled by his thoughts to concrete the moment in time and play it out all over again in the dream.

He’d remembered Dan’s face that night, tired from working into the late hours editing videos, yet genial and content, full of quiet satisfaction at being able to do nothing more than relax into an evening of watching movies together. He’d found it difficult not to stare, transfixed entirely by Dan’s profile lit ethereal by the glow of their TV screen, until Dan had turned to meet his gaze and the look on his face had abruptly sidled into one of deep consideration in which Phil could almost see the thoughts being churned and examined in his head. If asked to, Phil knew he probably could have filled in the blanks for exactly what Dan was thinking. It had been this way from the start, the both of them holding conversations without speaking, sharing nothing more than a knowing glance, a twitch of lips in a smirk, a small upward rise of eyebrows, too quick and subtle for others to see, but enough for them to look at each other and know exactly what the other meant without a word passed between them. In the lounge that night they had lingered in a charged silence Phil hadn’t dared to break, not even when the tip of Dan’s tongue had flickered out to lick his lower lip in a slow unconscious reflex, a nervous impulse Phil had only seen him exhibit when he was powerfully attracted to an idea or a person and had not yet found the words to express it.

In that moment the gesture had become one of unspoken intent. _Will he dare?_ It seemed to say. _Will I?_

It’s a question that had followed them from Manchester to London without an appropriate answer, a remainder of an earlier moment in time that had never been resolved. Circumstances and people whose names he didn’t know had convened throughout the years to encourage them together with the blunt tact of a winepress, but in that moment the world’s collective racket and roar had dulled to allow him a chance to finally answer the question for himself.

_It’s one thing to be lost in the dark and quite another to lose yourself willingly._

The idle thought had come to mind as Dan remained rapt, the ambient glow of the lounge coloring his eyes a muddled tint that had made Phil think of all the things he liked best about storms, a concordance of foudroyant light and heat and brontide in an effusion of raw energy that demanded an audience. Whatever storm was brewing inside Dan at that moment, whatever conflicting tide of questions and emotions that were now changing places furiously in his thoughts, Phil had thought he wanted to be there to meet it, to not turn away, whatever the outcome of their placid standoff might be.

_I think I dare._

The resolve had set in without a backward glance and Dan had mirrored that conclusion in the subtly canting posture of his relaxed slouch which brought his shoulder closer to Phil’s.

_No time, no time._

A voice hisses in his ear and Phil startles back to himself just before his current reality can shift back into the familiar environs of their home, before his mind can wander to complete the memory and lean closer to provide a more adequate response to the invitation settling on Dan’s face.

To be so forcibly jarred back into the cold dark path leaves him with the vague sensation of having left something unresolved, a matter of unfinished business that had always lingered between them, which not even a dream would allow him to explore in depth. It’s a thought that soon passes out of mind when he looks up and notices a speck of light in the distance which snares his attention and yanks him from the reverie until he forgets it altogether.

_A way out?_

He rushes over, shoes thudding against the ground in echoes that break up the oppressive whispers around him. The light swells, filling the path ahead in a vertical glow that becomes brighter the closer he gets and a cool breeze trickles down to rustle his hair with the promise of a world outside the terrestrial chamber. It’s a surge of hope that buoys his jog into a sprint.

It’s only when he’s a few yards away that he finally notices with breathless, sinking disappointment that the light isn’t coming from any exit he can reach, but instead pouring in from a doline high above. The sight is jarring enough to knock him off balance and it’s only grabbing at the walls and ending up with palmfuls of tacky liquid that keeps him from falling headlong to the ground.

As he regains his balance he rubs his hands absently against the front of his jumper and steps into the wavering column of sunlight. When he looks up the glare immediately bites into his eyes with a white flash of pain that makes him suck in a breath between his teeth. Gradually, between squinting glances that allows his eyes time to adjust, he makes out the walls of the pathway arching up high over his head like the dome of a cathedral.

_Exactly how far down am I?_

The hole above seems miles away and the sunlight is frigid on his arms as if the distance it’s had to travel to reach him here has made it lose all warmth. Past the continuous murmur of lilting voices around him he can hear the sounds of trees stirring in the wind and the faint cry of birds, teasing him with a freedom that extends well beyond his reach.

_Even if I thought I could climb that without breaking my neck, it’s too steep._

He cranes his neck and stares at the rocks, visible for the first time in the light. Every inch of their jagged black surface is covered in glossy runnels of the strange oily substance which had smeared across his fingertips. Even in the light he has no idea what the liquid is or where it comes from and as he glances down at his jumper he sees the wiped stains there are flecked with what appears to be bits of viscous red pulp.

 _Definitely not algae then. More like smashed beets or—_ (or placenta, the younger Dan of years ago interjects into his thoughts and he can’t help an involuntary smile. The memory provides a dose of welcome if questionable humor that warms his skin better than the fragile sunlight on his back.)

Lovely, he says aloud as he contemplates burning the jumper completely in lieu of throwing it away. He’s so intent on the stains and enjoying the small reprieve of illumination before having to move away from it in search of an exit, that at first he doesn’t notice the figure in black standing at the border of where the light wanes off back into shadow. When he does look up and realizes the presence of someone else standing before him blocking the path, he jumps backward with a small cry that makes the jittering whispers cut off at once into silence.

The figure is tall, dressed entirely in black and standing with their back turned to Phil, but there is something vaguely familiar about their frame and stance that gives him pause before he dares to believe it.

 _He’s waiting. No time, no time._ The cat’s departing remark comes back to mind with new context.

"Dan? What are you doing here?"

If he hears the question or his name called, Dan ignores it, but Phil is sure it’s him although he can’t see the figure’s face. There are certain details about a person that become immutable after so many years of living in their presence. He could identify Dan in a crowd when blindfolded just by palming the outline of his cheek and chin. Here, with dim illumination and without the benefit of touch he is no less certain. The way the hair falls to the back of the neck, the broad angle of the shoulders and the posturing curvature of the back are all unmistakable, but Dan continues to stand mutely with a perfect stillness Phil thinks disturbing. It’s the kind of graven immobility he associates with cemeteries and statues, an unnatural stasis no living thing can sustain for long before a tic of muscle or a small intake of breath shattered the illusion. He had seen the street performers adopting the guise of living statues throughout London, people who painted themselves with metallic sheens and perfected the ability to remain motionless so that it was easy at first glance to mistake them for sculpted installations, but even they had their limits.

What he witnesses in Dan is the stillness of the inanimate, of the dead, of something every instinct tells him is inhuman and dangerous.

A shudder ripples down his back and all at once he’s scared. The noises, the stench and the dark had been unpleasant enough, but this is a horror of a different kind, one entrenched in the rigid form of his friend that suggests a threat he can’t see. It’s a strange feeling he struggles to shake off. Nothing about Dan has ever made him feel cornered or on guard. The greatest shows of aggression Phil can remember limit themselves to a tossed game controller after Dan lost a level of Mario Kart or when he engaged in a loud one sided argument with his computer after a video failed to process. Malice was not a word Phil would ever associate with Dan, but all at once he’s bid by the urge to turn and flee in the opposite direction, disembodied whispers and rotting stench be damned.

But this is his roommate, his colleague, his friend. They have years of trust and a home between them. There’s no reason to be afraid, he thinks and despite the jarring hesitation turning his legs into steel weights beneath him he dares to take a step forward to the edge of the light.

“Dan?" He tries again, a forced attempt to rouse any reaction at all.

Dan remains immobile and mute, but all at once the indistinct voices skulking in the shadows break their silence to draw together with a sigh to whisper one coherent phrase which resonates harsh and high pitched in the air, like the susurrus of wind personified and filtered into a drawn out whistling hiss of a voice:

_Beware, he is Apollo. Impossible boy with an incorrigible heart. Beware._

The voices trail off into confused echoes until Phil isn’t sure if they had said heart or hunger or both, but it means nothing to him either way. The words are as nonsensical as the gibberish the voices had been before, but whatever message they meant to impart must have some meaning, for as if he’d heard the sibilant warning, Dan turns around with the slow mechanical grace of an automaton on a revolving mount, his profile gathering the thin aura of light from the doline above by varied degrees as he finally stops to afford Phil his attention.

At first it’s difficult to make sense of exactly what he’s looking at and for a few seconds until his mind catches up to interpret the visceral physical reaction of his body, Phil can’t understand why his heart stammers in his chest like a small frightened bird slamming against his ribcage, causing a chilled riot of gooseflesh to prickle along his skin. Then he notices the gaunt death’s head Dan’s face has become and the two eyes like occluded pits of black staring back at him.

 _It’s Dan_ , Phil thinks, _Dan with his layered fringe and black clothing, but it’s not him at all._

He feels as if he’s looking at a distorted reflection of the friend he remembers, a roughly hewn sculpture of brutal edges and harsh shadows. This Dan has a sardonic smile on his lips Phil finds he doesn’t much care for and a pallor so translucent Phil can see small networks of blue veins traveling up the sides of his neck and down the exposed skin of his arms. And then there are his eyes, the most arresting feature Phil notices at once and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The usual warm brown of the irises are gone, replaced by a startling eclipse save for where flecks of light reflect on their surface like tiny flames burning somewhere far and deep in Dan’s head. It reminds Phil of something he’d seen once in a documentary filming the survival of a small pack of wolves. The camera had followed their progress across a country road at night, panning over the pack sprinting past stopped traffic to disappear back into the shadows of the woods beyond, but one wolf, curious at the lingering promenade of cars, had stopped to stare directly into the glare of headlights. In that moment its eyes had turned an electric tourmaline hue, eerie and lambent in its skull, so for an instant it looked less like a wolf and more like the disquieted spirit of one instead.

Tapetum Lucidum, the narrator had gone on to describe, a distinctive eyeshine effect found in some animals, especially nocturnal carnivores, but never in humans, yet in the dream Dan stares back at him with two eyes darkened and refractive with unnatural luminescence. Whatever storm they now contain is bereft of any compassion. It’s a tempest made to destroy and Phil finds himself taking a half step backwards before he’s even aware of doing so.  
He blinks, wanting to be mistaken, wanting Dan’s eyes to be more like the color he’s come to associate with easy humor and sharp wit. For all that Dan might describe his eyes as oceans one could swim in or scoff over the impossible palette of colors that affect the irises depending on the lighting in the room or the color of his shirt, Phil thought there had always been something compelling about Dan’s eyes as well, a point that always earned him a long suffering look of tolerance whenever he brought it up.

“They’re just your average garden variety brown shared by most people in the world,” Dan had said on one occasion when Phil had mentioned it. “At least half your viewers write novel length fictions dedicated to the color of your eyes alone. Those icy blues or tropical greens or mako infused-honestly, make up your mind will you? All I can get is chocolate or coffee comparisons.”

Chocolate and coffee evoked pleasurable delights, sensory descriptors meant to imply something indulgent, welcoming and good, all adjectives Phil could easily apply to Dan’s character, but he can find nothing welcoming or good about the void looking back at him from this other Dan’s face. If eyes truly were the windows to the soul he wonders what that means for the Dan standing in front of him with eyes like the blank single minded glare of deep sea fish made for depths no human could withstand.

It’s monstrous and strange and it’s not just the color or the wavering points of light reflected there, but the calculating look Dan gives him, one which weighs his worth not as a friend but as prey.

“There’s a fine line between gods and monsters, you know. What we become or are made to be.”  
Dan abruptly breaks the silence between them and despite the snide cunning look of his face, his voice sounds conversational and benign, but like his appearance there is something off about his speech, an inflection to the tone that’s steeped in undercurrents of cold emotion.

He appears poised to speak again, but his mouth descends wider into a silent yawn. Phil thinks at first it’s a yawn until Dan’s jaw falls open further than is natural, like a viper stretching its mouth to swallow a meal larger than itself. He watches, brow furrowed in confusion and disbelief as Dan’s jaw bone unhinges and dislocates with a sickening crack to gape into a broken maw. It’s then Phil sees the rows of fangs like nettles bristling beneath his lips, sharp points of impossible lengths that should not fit in his mouth, wet and slick with saliva.

_Watering with hunger._

Dan tilts his head as if he’d heard the thought bloom in Phil’s mind and offers a crude facsimile of an open mouthed grin that stretches his face out to nightmarish proportions.  
At that instant Phil has the single lucid thought of: _This is a dream. This isn’t real and that isn’t Dan-whatever that is-that isn’t Dan._

The term slippage comes to mind, the way Stephen King had defined it in one of his books as a hazy border on which sanity and madness shared uneasy territory until it sidled fully into the realm of the pernicious. Looking at Dan and the crowd of fangs which have become his teeth, slippage has never seemed more like a vivid concept, one he finds he enjoyed more in a book than anything grounded in reality, not even a reality as reflected in a dream, especially not one now descended into a proper nightmare.

Wake up. Wake up.

As his consciousness crowds around him with the knowledge that nothing here is real he tries to will himself awake, to turn his head and force the dream to shift away from the twisted doppelganger of his friend, but a weight fixes itself on his back, seizing his muscles and pinning him where he stands with the leering demonic parody wearing Dan’s face.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

He’s aware suddenly that the only reason Dan (the creature, he amends) hasn’t advanced towards him is because of the pale halo of light surrounding him, a thin but palpable barrier keeping them at odds from each other. Dan hovers just at the edge, his mouth a severe rictus of fangs and his eyes a blank promise of murder as he waits in silence.

Right now let’s go now wake up wake up Wake. Up.

Like a bad joke, as soon as he’s aware of its protection, the light above falters to a pale glow before shuddering and fading into darkness.

WAKE UP NOW NOW RIGHT NOW-

Just as the last trickle of light dissipates from Phil’s shoulders, immersing him back in shadow, Dan lunges forward with vicious speed, the sharp collection of his teeth aimed wide like the jaws of a steel trap. The voices rise into a crescendo from the dark, mixing with his efforts to rouse himself in a dissonant clatter of whispers and shouts that ring into his ears with painful intensity.

NOW BEWARE WAKE UP BEWARE BEWARE RIGHT NOW WAKE UP

Instinctively Phil ducks and raises one arm to shield his face and just before he shudders awake with a strangled yell he feels each fang sink home into his flesh, past the gristle of muscle, straight into the bone.

### ❧❧❧❧

His mind kicks back into awareness with a start that runs through his limbs like electricity. For a heart pounding moment, when his eyes open to an indistinguishable haze of darkness, he’s convinced he’s still trapped in the remnants of his dream and immediately he tenses, prepared for another onslaught of fanged teeth he’s convinced is only inevitable. The muffled yammering of voices resounding in his ears and the peculiar burning sensation traveling down his arm in small painful jolts like teeth indenting the skin does nothing to dissuade him of this impression until he shifts and finds the left side of his face pressed against the back of the seat, distorting his initial groggy eyed view of the world. As he looks down he resolves the disconcerting pain in his arm as being nothing more than an aggravated case of pins and needles after having been trapped between the weight of his body pressing against the arm rest, effectively cutting off all circulation past the elbow. Every inch of movement exacerbates the numbing shocks of pain, curling his spine as he slowly moves to cradle the offended limb to his chest and catch his breath.

The confused murmurs in his ears continue to disorient him until he realizes they’re nothing more than the sounds of loud conversation muffled by the headphones still tucked over his head- all of it, merely small physical cues that had filtered into his sleep to inform the more disturbing aspects of his dream.

His lap is a mess of scattered milkybar buttons that appear to have spilled from the pack when he startled awake. The rest of them litter the floor under his seat, but his mind is still a fuzzy jumble of sleepy thoughts to regret their loss. He’s not yet fully awake when he notices his phone clutched tight in the white knuckled grip of his right hand, with one finger set to dial 999.  
He looks at the screen for a long moment in bleary eyed bewilderment wondering what it was exactly he’d meant to do. Dial emergency services for what? To tell the operator that he’d just had a dream bordering on a premonitory nightmare after not being able to speak with his friend and therefore needed nothing short of every available unit in the Met to find Dan and make sure he was alright?

For a moment, between the pain in his arm and the lingering memory of his nightmare, even that seems plausible enough for him to try and dial anyway.

As the weight of sleep begins to ebb away he takes time to appreciate that in the wake of the adrenaline surge of his abrupt re-entry to waking life, his migraine has receded to a tolerable hum of an ache.

 _Comfort in the small things_ , he thinks, as he rubs slow circles into his arm to soothe the numbness away, a motion which makes the pins and needles so intense he yanks his hand away and decides it better to leave well enough alone.

The murmur of voices in his ears grows into a heated pitch of an argument the headphones continue to distort into garbled phrases of which he can only make out the words, “-inconvenience,” “miserable little” and “absurd,” overlaid by a prolonged warble that sounds like a drawn out wail. At the same time as he reaches to tug the headphones off he turns to notice the view outside his window has stopped moving and the train itself appears to be stranded on the tracks nowhere near any station he can see. Before he can wonder at this development however, his attention is seized away as the headphones uncover his ears, abruptly depositing him back into the world of the train carriage’s angrily shouting passengers, of which Frustrated Joe and a caterwauling baby appear to be the loudest contenders.

“This is outrageous! I have to be in London by two! We’ve been here long enough, there should be some update about this delay by now. I cannot believe--Madam, for god’s sake, please control your child!”

The woman in the flowery housedress alternates between offering soothing murmurs of consolation to her baby and glaring back at Frustrated Joe as he looks down his nose at her with the air of a disapproving headmaster.

“Babies cry when they’re upset and she’s upset! What exactly do you want me to do? You don’t like it you can find another seat or coach to complain in.”

“Moving is hardly the issue here. The entire time we’ve been here has been nothing but a constant disturbance. If you had a bit more responsibility and discipline regarding your child-“

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

“Time! Time! No time now!” The old man adds his bellows to the fray and the two houseparty conversationalists groan as he makes his way up the aisle in a frenetic shuffle, arms raised like a vicar about to deliver a hell raising sermon.

“Shut that old fool up. Aw, Christ don’t lean over me, smells like a fuckin’ lav. Get out of my face.” One of them sneers and then leans back into the window with a thud that knocks his hat off his head as the old man looms over their seat to loudly proclaim the absence of time.

“No time! No time! You see, it’s all done!”

“Yeah, alright. Pack it in and save it for the nursing home.”

The baby’s wail dials up to an ear piercing shriek that Phil inwardly sympathizes with even as he cringes away from the sound.

“Madam, please! Your child!”

“Maybe if you weren’t carrying on like a self-entitled twat she wouldn’t be carrying on either! We’re all stuck here together so why don’t you just sit down and shut it.”

“Frustrated Joe” and the mother continue their spat as the old man totters down the aisle railing about time, all three figures creating a strange dynamic tableau Phil is helpless to do much more than stare at in mild consternation. Through it all, to add to the chaotic scene, announcements drone into the carriage in one long run on sentence of every recording programmed on its databank as weary passengers look up in strained amusement.

"Sorry this train is running five minutes late sorry this train is running ten minutes late sorry this train is running fifteen minutes late due to a technical fault this train will terminate at the next station please take care when leaving the train make sure you have everything with you the next stop is this train is out of service we are sorry for the inconvenience evacuation steps have been deployed please calmly evacuate the train this train is to be evacuated immediately please listen to the following announcement-"

Phil would think it funny under any other circumstances at the idea of the train going slightly mental, but it only makes him wonder if there might be a sub clause to Sod’s law, one which dictated that whenever something went wrong and you needed to be somewhere in a hurry, life would do its best to throw all manner of obstacles in your way to prevent you from getting there.

_Maybe I should have ground up those mirrors and buried them after all._

“Hell of a thing isn’t it?” The man seated behind Phil leans forward suddenly to address him. “Never thought this was what I’d wake up to this morning.”

“Sorry-what’s happened?”

“Well, we’ve stopped haven’t we?” The man gestures to the halted view outside the windows with a dismissive air. “Train just stalled on the tracks-some kind of system disruption, I think the conductor said. Heard fuck all since then. Announcement’s been going arse up for about twenty minutes now and those two have been going at it the entire time. Knew I should have just taken the M40 down, but with my luck I’d probably have been knee deep in traffic.”

Given current circumstances Phil considers that maybe driving to London would have been a better option and briefly laments the lack of a car before thinking that with his penchant for distraction and his distaste for confrontation, especially in the event of a collision where insurance information needed to be exchanged with a driver that might be “Frustrated Joe’s’ more irate cousin, it was probably better he didn’t drive. He envied Cat’s ability to converse and vlog while focusing on the road with a casual air of confidence as he and Dan exchanged glances behind her head like two parents concerned over their daughter’s questionable driving habits. As a passenger he often enjoyed car rides with friends, but the seat behind the wheel came with its own share of responsibilities and stressors he wasn’t ready to shoulder. There were far too many opportunities for disaster with changing lanes, road rage, darting squirrels, parking attendants, flat tires and rush hour traffic. It was all enough for him to gladly accept the services of a taxi whenever he needed one or flow along with the bustling crowds of the sweltering underground. Better the small inconveniences of public transport than the daunting responsibility of piloting a block of steel and trying to keep it in lane and intact on the road. 

The idea alone is enough to give Phil a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach he attributes more to the impatient anxiety building up inside him with Dan still unaccounted for and a train stuck on the tracks a good many miles away from home.

The man pauses and looks Phil over appraisingly. “You alright there? You look a bit peaky.”

“Oh no, I’m fine.”

 _Had a nightmare where my best friend decided to bite a chunk out of my arm and I’m not sure if it’s something you might call an omen or a sign that I need to give my subconscious less material to attack me with in my sleep by not watching horror movies in the dark_ , he adds silently to himself.  


“I just drifted off and woke up to…this.”

“Yeah, imagine that’d be a nasty shock to the system. Still, could be worse, some years back train derailed and a few carriages went clear over on their side. Plenty of injuries and lawsuits in the making. Had to wait an entire day for the mess to get cleared off the tracks in order to get anywhere. Hopefully we don’t collide with another train going in the same direction as us, eh?”

“Uh…right.” Phil can only blink at the man’s toothy grin, unsure if he realizes how unsettling the idea actually was.

“Can’t say we don’t have enough by way of entertainment in the meantime until this gets sorted out.” The man nods his head at the argument quickly escalating in the aisle. “If their row gets any more heated somebody should suggest a proposal.”

Or a swat team, Phil thinks as Frustrated Joe’s pate takes on an alarming hue of mottled red that brings to mind the bombs in final fantasy, ready to explode in a combustible fit of rage threatening to take out everyone in the immediate vicinity. The baby’s next breath gives voice to a shriek that reaches an impressive blood curdling crescendo which finally snaps Frustrated Joe’s strained formality.

“You do something and stop its incessant whinging or I will!”

He towers over mother and child, meaning to intimidate with his booming voice and bulky height but the mother rises to the challenge quite literally as she shoots up from her seat in a frenzied rush to reveal a stature that easily surpasses his.

“You think you’re big, yeah? Big man running his big mouth? You don’t scare me,” she says in a conversational tone that belies the wide eyed fury of her face. “If you so much as touch her, so much as breathe on her, I’ll knock your teeth so far down your throat you’ll be shitting molars for days.”

The two house party mates choke on their collective glee at this declaration and Frustrated Joe stumbles backwards in surprise from the woman’s cold wrath, nearly falling over into the seats across from him prompting a laugh from the two girls looking up from their paused game to watch the spectacle.

“Mate, I’d listen to her if I were you. Between you and the baby, the only whinging getting on anyone’s nerves here is yours,” the man seated behind Phil calls out.

“Shove off, dick wanker,” someone else yells up to Frustrated Joe and Phil can’t help agreeing with the sentiment despite its redundancy.

Frustrated Joe sputters in indignation with a sound like steam escaping a kettle before he grabs his briefcase and storms down the aisle, with the intention, Phil supposes, of moving to another carriage and walking off his frustrations before the mother can make good on her word. He leaves a trail of muttered epithets in his wake critiquing the ‘piss poor state of the rail system’ and having to endure a train ride with a ‘bunch of uneducated slobs.’

He slams the door behind him when he leaves and immediately the harried energy in the air dissipates as the mother takes her seat and quells the baby’s wail to low gurgles of protest and the old man shambles back to the other end of the carriage, his fervor for the moment exhausted. Announcements continue to spill out overhead, but the passengers ignore it, all of them falling back into the quiet murmur of their private conversations.

_Beware, he is Apollo._

With the brief distraction of Frustrated Joe’s defeat gone, the warning echoes back into Phil’s thoughts as a bleak reminder of his troubled dream, but even awake and aware he remains nonplussed to its meaning. Dan was the one more suited to penning the details of dreams and sifting through their portents for ideas or clues to whatever subconscious disasters his waking mind had secured away. Phil wondered what he would make of a dream that involved a hellish double of himself, cryptic whispers in the dark and an oversized disgruntled cat who spoke exclusively in Geordie.

_He would probably start breaking everything down and analyze the details from there. But after that, what exactly am I supposed to make of it? I may have studied psychology, but ’m not exactly Carl Jung._

In the absence of anything else better to do with a train stalled on the tracks, his sweets a useless mess on the floor and a marked lack of interest in falling asleep again, he opens the browser on his phone and decides to research Wikipedia, typing in the word Apollo and waiting for the entry to load on the screen. Once it does, he immerses himself in the information and begins to read.

"Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in classical Greek and Roman religion. The ideal of the korous, a beardless, athletic youth –"  
Athletic? Well, that’s one parallel Dan would probably argue against, he thinks as he continues reading.  
"Apollo has been variously recognized as a god of music, truth and prophecy, healing, the sun and light, plague, poetry, and more."

As herald of music, Phil sees at least one parallel as Dan had proficient skill for a self-taught pianist with an ear for tweaking a composition and making the best of every note so that it filled the house with a rich full-bodied sound Phil was often impressed that Dan could coax from the old ill-tuned piano in his room. When it came to Apollo’s distinction as herald of the sun however, it was usually the reverse which was true when it came to fan created artwork depicting them both as personifications of the time of day, with Phil drawn in a backdrop of blue skies and bright sun and Dan providing the nocturnal contrast of cool moonlight and stars. As he continues skimming through the passage he finds little else in common with Dan, especially when he scrolls down to read the god’s more ominous reputation as a purveyor of plague and death, a descriptor he thinks better suited to the strange monstrous version of the Dan in his nightmare, a creature with an appetite made to devour and ravage.

 _Then again it was just a dream_ , he thinks. _If every dream was meant to be a message in disguise I’d never be able to sleep again. Unless my subconscious is trying to tell me that Dan has some kind of god complex? And a need to visit the dentist?_

Dan had a competitive edge, a benign temerity that pushed him to achieve the best at whatever challenge confronted him, whether it was improving the quality of a video or eating a chili pepper whole in order to complete a dare Phil had no interest in attempting himself. It was hardly a trait Phil would describe as a god complex and he remembers Dan outright rejecting the idea himself as they’d stood together waiting to go onstage at a convention as their audience set up a collective primal roar in the background, a chorus of excitement that had sounded as if they were convened inside a gladiatorial arena, an analogy Phil had thought not too far off from the truth. Their presence was built on entertainment and all it took was a collective thumbs up or thumbs down for the metaphorical sword to either end their careers or stay the execution. The reaction still jarred him whenever they walked out on stage subject to thousands of eyes and voices all reaching for him as one, interrupting any attempts to speak with a crushing dissonance of enthusiasm that would knock him over if they had any more physical strength behind their voices.

“The way they’re yelling out there like we’re the second coming or something,” Dan had said. “I’m glad Thu’ums don’t actually exist. Do you know how terrifying that would be?”

Phil had received a mental image of them both flying offstage, propelled solely by the crowd’s screams and he had laughed as Dan shook his head.

“I won’t say it isn’t flattering. I’d be more concerned if we walked out to golf claps, but you have to wonder what it is they’re seeing when they look at me as if I’m something extraordinary.”

“You are,” Phil had replied in an instant, an automatic confident response that had prompted Dan to smirk and look away.

“Right. Just like you’re amazing, I suppose.” The comment had been a low murmur Phil would have missed if he hadn’t been listening for it. “It’s just startling- to think that we can elicit that reaction in the first place. They’re roaring at a fever pitch and trying to speak over all that raw energy is like...I don’t know, trying to command a riptide. Then, all it takes is one word, one small action, an offhand subtle look and they move to capture it all and affect the internet with trending topics that feature my face and name all over gifsets, tweets and tumblr posts-it’s mind blowing.”

“Like a true internet cult leader.”

“Oh, of course. I’m sure I won’t regret that ironic turn of phrase in a few years. But seriously, you don’t feel like that adulation gets out of hand sometimes?”

Phil had paused to reflect. In some cases he conceded that maybe it did, in those moments when his actions and words were examined for clues to affirm suspicions or justify dislikes, like junior forensic scientists all prepared with a string of theories and a million screenshots to support them or when they were inundated by unexpected visitations of viewers at the radio station with camera phones ready when he was anything but. It was a tenuous relationship he was still acclimating himself to. He knew part of it was built on the intense curiosity that came from wanting to have more insight into celebrities one admires, although he’d never been comfortable with assuming the term. As public figures they attracted attention and as their presence and projects grew so too did their audience, followed by the inevitable scouring of their past with hundreds of strangers dredging up sound bytes and photos and gifsets framing moments in time he’d long since forgotten or spinning them into fictions that stretched his personality into situations too bizarre and intimate to be so casually displayed on the screen for him to read, like experiencing a surreal out of body experience stranger than anything he’d ever encountered or done, which he’d supposed was saying something. The dedication and fervor that now surrounded them was of a caliber he’d never witnessed before and certainly had never dreamed of encountering when he first started editing videos together purely to express a creative desire and to share the eccentricities of his strange and wonderful life as one would do when casually speaking with a friend. Sometimes it all just prompted him to wonder, ‘who exactly do they think I am or that we are for that matter?’

The subject was of a kind that required more thought than he could invest in the few minutes they had before they were called to the stage. The immediacy of the moment, the small thrill of excitement in the air and the promise of an evening spent catching up with friends they hadn’t seen in a while was a diversion he’d wanted to enjoy rather than dwell on the more solemn implications of their careers.

“Sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming. It did inspire a lot of…strange fan mail back when our P.O box was open, but it’s not all bad. As long as they don’t crowd our doorstep it should be fine. I like being able to draw some lines between work and privacy and home is the one line. Thinking about it, for the longest time it was just us in a flat in Manchester and before that just me in my bedroom trying to do the best I could on my own.” Phil had smiled, momentarily lost in a twinge of nostalgia. “Now we can fill rooms and crowd hallways with people wanting to meet us. The idea is daunting, if I’m honest, but I don’t regret it. Although-”

“You miss it too.”

Dan had known exactly what he’d meant to say without him having to finish the thought. A part of them would always be tied to their humble beginnings in a Manchester flat with its tetchy kitchen faucet and small bedroom spaces, back when Dan had just begun to amass an audience, back when he’d first decided to tie his presence with Phil and try something new. In certain instances when the demands of their careers reached overwhelming peaks that frustrated creative expression, usually when he was tired of sifting through papers to file taxes or crunch numbers to figure out the logistics of a new project they’d wanted to try, Phil wished for a way to turn down the volume of their presence to a low drone, away from the collective buzzing scrutiny of the crowds on the internet and on the street, only for a little while, back to a moment in time when things had been a little less complicated, when they could throw off whatever technical restraints had boxed them in allowing them to relax into a whirlwind weekend doing everything and nothing at all.

“A part of me misses it,” he had replied, “and a part of me is happy we made it to this point at all. I wouldn’t change anything. I like this, what we’re doing, every bit of it, but maybe I’m just nostalgic for the simplicity.”

“I know what you mean. I think I’m just starting to absorb the responsibility factor of it, trying to grapple with the idea that more people recognize me when I walk out the door when not too long ago I was this mess of a twelve year old with a website lucky enough to have four visitors at any given time. Now I’m trying to answer emails from people who call me an inspiration or gone so far to say I’ve saved their lives just by me waffling about in a video-how can I possibly reply to that? It’s this incredibly humbling, disorienting, validating thing that’s happening and I’m still trying to figure out my place in all of it. I’m not a god, but some of the things they tell me, it’s as if I might as well be to them.” Dan had paused and grinned, an open-faced look of delight that Phil had wanted to capture in a snapshot on his phone. “Wouldn’t be such a bad arrangement actually. Imagine? I could just walk around with a laurel wreath on my head and have people hand feed me grapes.”

“Wouldn’t malteasers be more appropriate?”

“So you’re agreeing I should be worshipped?”

“Well, you did it so often with me when we first met I figured you’d want a chance to know what it felt like.”

“…Shut up.”

They’d both laughed as their names had been announced to a deafening fanfare of raised voices that enveloped them as they’d walked onstage.  
_So different from how we first started_ , Phil had thought as the floor lights illuminated them and the strobe flicker of camera flashes had begun to dart through the crowd like small stars. _From arranging small meetups in parks and fields to this._

For all that their names may be touted and revered by their viewers they aren’t ascendant deities. They are something however. They’ve taken on relevance and references of inspiration for many people. He sees it in the shaking reticence of those who pose for pictures alongside them, teary eyed with emotions too strong for him to understand or evidenced in the outpouring of support they receive at meet and greets when they returned home to a lounge full to overflowing with letters and presents from people he’s never met. It would be easy to fall back onto a sense of superiority, to lord their successes and newfound fame in an excess of hubris, flaunt it in the faces of those who had been certain they would never make it, who had told him he would never reach the plateaus of achievement they now enjoyed, but the idea had always repelled him. He’d never liked to play the part of crass cynic with a bite to every word that fell from his mouth. If anything how far they’ve come instills him with a sense of awe and humility instead.

They are not gods, not monsters, even if sometimes the terms are interchangeable in the minds of their most devoted critics. It’s the nature of their careers where public opinion would always be at odds with their own, but he had made peace with that truth long ago and now was only concerned with moving forward and making the best of every opportunity despite the odds. The journey to where they were now had always seemed surreal on reflection and he thought it funny sometimes when he rose in the middle of the night for a glass of water and paused by Dan’s ajar bedroom door, to reflect on how wonderful it was that so many years later he’s able to stand in their flat, their home, and be able to say these things which are ‘ours,’ these successes which ‘we’ share, these little things you still love about me and the little things I still love about you even after so many years of acquaintance; and the way we move and think, the way I say, ‘Maybe?’ And you say ‘Yes.’ Funny now when he’d never thought about it before, to be so inextricably linked to someone who had quickly gone on to become a person whose presence daily filled a space of longing in a corner of his heart.

They’d strained the definition of what determined a best friend, taken it to another level of trust and affection that some had gone so far to call a preternatural connection, but as he glances up from his phone over to the girls still contentedly occupied with nothing but each other’s presence, he thinks it’s also quite normal when you find someone you connect with on the deepest of levels, when self-consciousness gives way to relaxed mannerisms, when every step around each other doesn’t feel like treading on eggshells, when every word is lightly meant and lightly taken, when confidences are exchanged and never shared; when you have the rare fortune of finding someone to share a home with and yet find the word itself only meaningful when home was occupied by both and not just one.

_Whatever the tipping point between gods and monsters actually is, whatever that means, we’ve been fortunate not to define ourselves by either one and if we play it right, we never will._

He looks back at his phone and idly scrolls past the information on the page, but just as he’s about to investigate another link, the screen is overtaken by an alert.

A new text message.

For an instant he can only stare, his heart racing along at a rate that quickly makes him lightheaded even as his eyes rove across to notice the sender is actually his brother. It takes another moment for the information to sink in and when it finally does the disappointment is a physical weight that draws a sigh from his mouth.

[Checking in. Are you home yet?]

He immediately types back a reply: [No, the train’s stopped on the tracks. :( Not sure why. Just waiting now. I left my suitcase at the station too…]

[I’ll pick it up for you. Do you want me to send it over or do you want me to keep it just in case?]

[I’ll let you know.]

[Tell me when you get home.]

Phil reads enough between the lines to see his brother really meant “tell me if everything is ok, if Dan is ok.”

It’s another hour before the droning announcements from the speakers cut out into silence and another three hours before the train moves again. When it does, it starts up with a shuddering jolt that throws Phil forward, nearly sandwiching his nose against the seat in front of him, but at the last minute before impact he throws up his arms to catch himself.

“Bloody hell, that’s a wakeup call,” the man seated behind him says as the conductor takes to the speakers through a crackle of static to address the passengers.

In the background Phil hears the faint but unmistakable voice of Frustrated Joe venting his promise to take immediate legal action as soon as they reach London for the ‘outrageous inconvenience’ he’s had to endure in an incensed diatribe that is quickly drowned out beneath the conductor’s flat unconcerned tone.

“Afternoon, everyone. We apologize for this unforeseen delay. There were a series of technical faults and problems with the power to the track circuits that have only now been resolved. This is a temporary fix however which is why our speed will be considerably slower than usual, but we should proceed along our route without any further incidents. We do apologize for the inconvenience. Our arrival time for Euston station has now been changed to approximately six o’clock. I’d like to think we will arrive a bit sooner, but I can’t guarantee that at the moment.”

A few passengers tut their disapproval of this statement and shake their heads, resigned now to do little else but wait until they arrive at the station.

“Refunds will be offered to all passengers for this delay. Once again, I do offer my apologies for the inconvenience.”

Throughout the entire announcement Phil hears Frustrated Joe listing names of high court judges and barristers he knows to put the entire rail line out of business and before the mic abruptly cuts off Phil is certain he hears the conductor mutter, ‘I don’t get paid enough for this.’

 _Nearly home_ , he thinks. _An almost three hour trip has suddenly become an all day ordeal, but I’m nearly home._

His nerves are frayed with impatience, but he decides the trundling forward motion of the train is better than no motion at all. As power lines dip and flow past the horizon outside the window, he wonders if Dan had ever felt this way when he first embarked on a trip North to see Phil, if his heart and stomach had been filled with the same nervous energy as the train neared the station. 

He thinks back, retraces their steps to very beginning and concludes that the entire narrative of their lives together could be summed up in the motion of swaying train cars and the clack of steel against the tracks. There was something at once flattering and intimidating at the idea of Dan traveling alone, braving the crowds and oddities of public transport just so they could meet up and laze about for the rest of the week watching movies into the late hours, eating cereal past breakfast, playing games and discussing ideas for videos in tones of mutual encouragement- Those hectic early days of their acquaintance when they had both fairly buzzed with excitement at being able to spend time together. The novelty of it had never worn off, not even when they had packed their belongings in boxes and hauled themselves off to London on a risk of a chance at something better. It was still present in every earnest smile or sardonic grin they shared, in the sleepy morning hullo’s they exchanged when they passed each other in the hall, in the shocks of laughter that echoed in the lounge when one or the other or both lapsed into the strangeness of their personalities. And as the train’s slow but steady progress brings him a few miles closer to home that same buzz of excitement grows into a static charge of yearning he can almost feel along his spine.

_Nearly there. Just a little more. If the train doesn’t break again. Please don’t break again._

When Euston station finally appears in the distance the sun is a dying fire in the sky and Phil’s mind is a racket of exclamation points that leaves him straining to disembark and grab a taxi to their house. He usually dreaded the more enthusiastic drivers with a lead foot on the gas pedal and a worrying lack of interest in applying the brakes, but as the train finally pulls into the terminus he finds himself less concerned over the possibility of catching a ride with Lewis Hamilton’s double at the wheel.

The train coasts to a stop with a hiss and the carriage instantly becomes a bustle of activity. Passengers hurry to secure bags and suitcases, their voices raised in tones of eager anticipation to leave the steel confines of the train after so many hours stuck with nowhere else to go. The automated onboard announcement flows past the speakers without breaking off into the protracted drone that had inundated the carriage before, pleasantly narrating instructions to remember all personal belongings and to mind the gap in a soothing voice that contradicts the former chaos of their interrupted journey. When it finishes, the conductor comes on to offer one last address.

“Good evening, everyone. Just a reminder once again to please remember all your belongings when exiting the train and please note that refunds will be offered to all passengers as a result of our delay. We do thank you for traveling with us and hope you will consider travel with us again in future despite the inconvenience of our circumstances today.”

“Not much of a bloody choice is there, unless I want to take a jet up to Leeds. Probably better all things considered,” the man seated behind Phil mutters up to the conductor’s voice as he brushes past the crowd in the aisle to stand before the doors.

Phil stands and spends a few confused minutes searching for his suitcase before remembering he’d left it behind. Hands empty, save for his phone which he slides into the zippered pocket of his jacket, he takes his place with the rest of the passengers ready to exit and as soon as the doors open he wastes no time in rushing out as if afraid the doors might snap shut again in another freakish glitch, trapping him inside.

On the platform he hears Frustrated Joe confronting the conductor to demand recompense greater than what he calls the, ‘measly refund of a ticket that’s hardly equal to the pain and suffering that’s been inflicted on me.’ The two houseparty mates file past in unison to linger and listen to the spectacle, one of them raising their phone to record the encounter, but Phil has no mind to play eavesdropper as he hastens his pace towards the exit.

He’s nearly at the escalators when a familiar voice and a hand on his shoulder stops him in his tracks.

“Ollie! There’s a lad. A minute for the time, Ollie.”

_Oh no._

Phil turns around wide-eyed to find the old man’s craggy face looming uncomfortably close to his own. With barely a foot between them Phil detects an odor seeping out from the man’s clothes, a rank of offal similar to the one he had encountered in his dream. It’s a sour reek of brine, mothballs and bad grapes that leaves Phil with the pressing need to break away and leave, but the hand on his shoulder bears down with surprising strength.

“He’s waiting now. No time, no time.”

Phil stares, frozen in place now by his own shock.

 _It’s just a coincidence_ , he thinks, _It was just a dream. Just the cat repeating words I heard the old man say when I was awake. Not the other way around, because of course how could he know? It’s just a coincidence._

Despite his mind’s race to subvert his initial reaction with one of reason, a heady sensation of superstitious fear wells up with an acidic tinge of bile at the back of his throat.  
“No time, Ollie. It’s all done. He’s waiting.”

“Sorry, I don’t really understand what you mean. Could you-?” Phil makes to lightly step away from the crushing weight of the old man’s forcible grip on his shoulder but the hand only tightens, keeping him in place.

“Mind the time, Ollie. You must.”

The old man releases him and nods solemnly as if agreeing with himself. Phil can only gape as the old man merges back into the crowd, clutching his newspaper in one hand as he goes until the crushing sea of passengers moving as one to the exits bears him along and out of sight. The last Phil sees of him is the grey scrap of his stained trench coat and a scraggly shock of white hair.

“Today has been a day,” He concludes as he takes in a breath and shoves his hands into his jacket pockets in an effort to mask their small tremble. The rest of his passage through the station, past the brightly lit shops and the milling crowd of commuters waiting for their departures, proceeds without further interruption and before he steps through the doors to leave, he can still hear the resonant shout of Frustrated Joe echoing faintly through the station.

### ❧❧❧❧

He steps outside to a cool breeze and the distinct scent of ozone prefacing the arrival of yet another rain storm. For now however, the sky is calm and the sun has already disappeared beneath the horizon, its last remaining dregs of light staining the grey gathering of clouds in subdued tones of purple and red. He takes down the pavement at a fast clip, in such a rush to hail a taxi that he collides with the shoulder of another man going in the opposite direction.

“Sorry!” He takes time enough to call back over his shoulder with what he hopes is a sincere expression of apology on his face before he turns and rushes over to a cab lingering at the curb. He steps into the back and gives the driver his address with a calm he doesn’t feel. It’s a vibe the driver must pick up on because the vehicle pulls away and bears him onward into London’s heart with swift silent speed as the city rises up to rush past in the reflective glare of the windows. He’s not sure he’s ever been happier to return home to the bustling crowds of red double decker buses, black cabs and cyclists all jostling for place on the road in a congested mess that his driver is somehow able to weave around with expert, albeit heart stopping, precision.

The interior of the cab is steeped in quiet, Phil too preoccupied with arriving home to make small talk as he otherwise might- a lapse of social etiquette that the driver thankfully doesn’t appear to mind. His fingers tap absently at the side of the phone in his pocket, still waiting for a last minute text that might make his relief at finally arriving home more tenable; But when the cab reaches the corner of his block and their home rises up in the distance, there is nothing further for him to hope for than to unlock the front door, walk up the stairs and find Dan there in the hall.

Because if he isn’t home…

He doesn’t finish the idea and instead pays the fare, grateful at least that he had the presence of mind that morning to slide his wallet into the lining pocket of his jacket and not leave it behind with the rest of his belongings.

He drops the keys five times in his haste before he successfully chooses the right one and slides it home into the lock, the tumblers giving away with a perfunctory click that helps to ground him with the assurance that he has finally arrived home. The rest of his passage into the stairwell up to their front door is a hazy blur. He’s only aware of dropping the keys again another four times before the door opens to an unsettling stillness.

The lights are off and the paler shades of the evening quickly overtaking the sky outside suddenly turns home into an ominous place to venture into. There are no creaks or moans, no theatrical displays of dripping blood or peering ghosts, yet the silent dark in the halls holds a suggestive threat that momentarily seizes Phil with a twinge of fear.  
It’s been longer than he can remember since he was afraid of intangible threats. Usually he could cope with the aftermath of a horror movie, ground its shock and gore in the distant realm of fiction it inhabited. His fears always found their form in the plausible, in the assured cruelty of people who meant him harm or in the unpredictable menace of the natural world, in its buzzing wasps and creeping spiders, but now, standing there in the dark environs of their home, his arm still tingling with the memory of needle sharp teeth sliding past his skin, he could believe anything. In the muffled silence the world contracts to that of his childhood, to a moment in time when his shadow conversed freely from its lengthened silhouette along the floor and a ravenous wolf roamed the attic of his home, only this time the shadows offer no camaraderie in their threatening forms along the walls and the wolf set to ravage him had worn the face of his best friend.

 _It’s nothing_ , he roughly pushes his fringe back in exasperation at himself, _this is just home and I’m too tired to think properly. I’m here, safe and sound._

He makes his way carefully past the bathroom, hands sliding along the wall to feel for the light switch. For an instant, before light floods the hall, he’s reminded of his tremulous passage through the dark cave in his dream and his fingers twitch back involuntarily as he remembers the slickly coated unpleasant surface of the rocks. Artificial light makes quick work of his overactive imagination, revealing nothing more than mundane white washed walls. It’s clear at once as he progresses on that not only does the flat appear as normal as he left it, but it’s also completely devoid of the presence of another person.

_It doesn’t mean anything. He shuts the lights off before turning in and we don’t usually keep them all on in a row when it’s just one of us at home._

Their electricity could be fickle at the worst of times, turning the simple task of pressing a light switch into a game of Russian roulette when a surge made the lights fizzle and pop without warning, at times exploding light bulbs in a violent fanfare until they could replace the shattered remnants. It had made them more vigilant about conserving power when they had the chance, trying to minimize the strain their own equipment put on the already taxed electrical circuits of their home; But another intrusive thought suggests that the stifled darkness isn’t the mark of Dan playing mindful energy conservationist, he may not have come home at all, an idea which trails after him as he takes the stairs to their bedrooms two at a time.

He notices his room first, the door wide open and a small trail of destruction leading inside to an unkempt bed with pillows tossed on the floor and his duvet missing.

_I know I didn’t leave it like that._

He stoops down to retrieve his lion plush and looks it over as if hoping it might reveal some clue to the mystery without the benefit of an annotation over its tiny maned head.

_So he was here. Did he maybe do a wash, but if so, why?_

He can only think of Dan returning from Louise’s party tipsier than originally reported. Dan had a taste for liquor and a stomach to withstand it, but Phil couldn’t down alcohol as he might have once done as a teenager and he assumes Dan would be no exception. As he takes in the destruction of his bed he winces at the thought of Dan stumbling into it blasted drunk and throwing up the remnants of too many cocktails and partially digested dinner as he slept. It’s a bleak but hopeful idea that takes hold in his mind as he looks over to the door of Dan’s bedroom and finds it tightly shut.

_Washed my cover and went to nurse the rest of his hangover in his own bed?_

He’s aware every assumption is a feeble act of grasping at straws as he walks over and reaches out for the doorknob. The train journey had been long, but now in the confines of his own home, only inches from Dan’s bedroom door, he finds himself unprepared to open it and find an empty room on the other side. It’s a fear that keeps him from turning the handle and instead, he leans his forehead against the door frame and waits.

 _Be there. Just be there_ , he thinks before raising a hand to knock.

“Dan?”

He shuts his eyes and waits for an answer that never arrives.

“Dan.”

Nothing.

“Dan. Please.”

Only the muffled hush of a car passing in the street answers him and he clenches the handle in a grip he knows will leave a red mark across his palm later.

 _Right._ He grits his teeth, steels his nerves, twists the handle and steps inside.

The castoff light from his bedroom illuminates a portion of the floor and the small bundles of clothing gathered there into strategic piles where they would be out of shot when filming. It’s a controlled disorganization that’s otherwise normal where Dan is concerned but what is not normal and catches Phil’s eye immediately is the way Dan’s room has become a darkened cave. He stares, uncomprehending at the blacked out windows on the far wall before realizing that Dan’s bedcovers and sheets have been securely fastened in place around each corner in a fastidious attention to detail that blocks out any sliver of light. His own bedcovers, a brightly patterned anomaly of color at odds with the monochromatic scheme of Dan’s room, quickly stands out as a messy lump on the bed. A few curling strands of Dan’s hair peek out over the top, the rest of his body hidden under a riot of blue and green.

Phil stares at the bed in silence while processing a mixed stew of emotions that cycle between frustration, relief and confusion. It’s been longer than he can remember since he found reason to be upset over anything between them, but this now seems like a good reason. The long years they’d spent living in each other’s company had time and again brought up the natural barbed wire of discontent lining the borders of any relationship when proximity became too much to bear or when differences arose to feed misunderstandings. He’s never liked those moments when they’ve surfaced, when they’ve had to skirt the edges of unrest, the private harsher things between them that of course the camera never shows and he’s always glad when the storm passes over enabling them both to emerge intact and united. They’d reached a point of becoming well versed in wrangling the vicissitudes of their lives with the grace of experience and compassion, finding comfort in mutual distance when necessary or smoothing over any argument into more placable speeches.

Because Dan has never really been unreasonable, he thinks as he stares at the lump beneath his bedcover, maybe careless sometimes, overlooking something in the heat of the moment when he’d otherwise take care, but never willfully hurtful unless his mind was too tired or frustrated to filter his actions. Empathetic compassion was a trait innately etched into Dan’s being, a quality that had made him keen to accept Dan as a friend and roommate in the first place. He’s not sure how he’ll handle the conversation when Dan wakes, but a confrontation is the one thing he’s sure neither of them need right now.

The memory of his troubled train journey and the dream still lingering in the form of a queasy stomach ache makes the warring emotions in his head finally concede to relief. He has no energy or inclination to turn his exasperation into anger and his body admits defeat, suddenly too tired to withstand his weight any longer and he takes the liberty of plopping down at the edge of Dan’s bed with a sigh.

Of course. Of course, he was fine, Phil thinks and feels a twinge of embarrassment at the thought of texting his brother with the news that the only emergency he’d returned home to find was the sudden theft of his duvet and Dan apparently in a drunken stupor too powerful to allow him to crawl out of bed and check his phone.

 _You left a family reunion because I didn’t text you back?_ He can almost see the expression of incredulous amusement on Dan’s face and knows it will be some time before he’s allowed to live it down.

Out of all the things he’s done, nearly walking out into the middle of traffic while texting, placing cacti in cupboards while half-asleep and snatching cereal boxes to secretly munch on in his bedroom, cutting his holiday short to take a day-long train ride back home just to find Dan asleep in bed was probably the epitome of his foibles and only one more thing for him to shake his head over in reminiscence.

_At least nothing went wrong. He’s fine. He decided to use his bed sheets for curtains apparently, but he’s fine._

As he continues to stare it occurs to him that he hasn’t seen the covers move in the telltale heave of breathing. In fact, between his sudden entry into the room and him sitting on the bed, Dan hasn’t moved at all. He leans closer and frowns. The longer he listens for the distinctive whispering rumble of breath filtering through Dan’s nose the more an unnerving silence crowds around him.

He reaches out and places a hand gently on where he assumes Dan’s shoulder to be and gives it a slight shake.

“Dan. Wake up.”

Everything is too quiet, too still, it’s the disoriented feeling of the dream flooding back to him again as if he were still trapped on the train with miles between them although Dan is right here and it’s then Phil’s nerve snaps into a white haze of alarm.

He grabs hold of Dan’s shoulder with a grip he’s distantly aware will leave a bruise later and commences shaking him violently through the bed covers.  
At first there is nothing but the slack give of limbs moving bonelessly without reaction and Phil’s mind shorts out into a blank screen of static.

“Dan!” His voice rings out in a sharp clarion call and later his lower back aches from the exertion of force he applies behind each shove. 

There’s a distinctive hollow thud of Dan’s head smacking the headboard followed by a strangled yell like a cut off snarl, but Phil’s too lost to his panic to hear. He jostles Dan back and forth, causing Dan’s head to knock against the headboard another two times until he surges awake in a blur of flailing arms and kicking legs that throws the duvet to the floor and knocks Phil backwards off the bed to join it.

“Get off me-!” Dan swipes at the air blindly and as Phil straightens up to stare he freezes in place on the floor.

For a second, for the barest of moments, he sees a pale hissing visage of black eyes and sharp teeth looking back at him.

[Impossible boy-Incorrigible hunger.]

He blinks and it’s suddenly just Dan in front of him, strained and wan, peering over the bed with a lost hollow eyed expression as if he’d like nothing more than to retreat back to the pillow and fall asleep again. His hair is beyond any semblance of order as it crowds around his face in unruly curls that lends him the unearthly mien of a wild untrammeled creature that had crept in from the woods to sleep. Even so, as messy and exhausted as Dan appears, Phil thinks he hasn’t seen a more welcoming sight.

“Phil?” Dan creeps up further to the edge of the bed and squints down, one hand rubbing the side of his temple with a muttered, ‘ow.’

“What are you-why did-” He scrunches his eyes closed and takes on a look of troubled contemplation. “What’s happened?”

“I was going to ask you that.” Phil gathers himself up from the floor slowly. “Are you...alright?”

“What? Yes, of course I am. What time is it-“ Dan trails off and turns his head to stare at his windows as if seeing them for the first time. His gaze darts back to Phil and awareness begins to trickle in, replacing sleepy confusion with one of growing alarm. “What are you doing here?”

“I’ve been texting you-calling you. You never replied to me after your last text said you were stepping out. I had no idea if you were- you just disappeared.”

“What are you-“ Dan pauses, the glint of awareness becoming more evident in his wide eyed gaze as he stares at his hands and looks up in horror as Phil paces over to the window to tug at a corner of the bedcovers hung there.

“What is all this?”

“Don’t touch that!” The command is a guttural yell that stops Phil in his tracks and he looks back over his shoulder to find Dan half out of bed, hands raised towards him in a frantic plea to stop.

“Dan, what is going on?”

“Just step away from there. Now. Please.”

Phil complies and steps away quickly, holding up his hands to show he meant no harm. “Sorry, I didn’t know. Is this for a video?”

“What? No, no it’s not. Phil, why are you here?”

“Were you listening to anything I just said?”

Dan abruptly fixes him with a plaintive expression and Phil’s next breath catches in his throat. It’s a raw, helpless look of yearning he’d only seen on Dan’s face the day he’d stormed up from the couch in their old flat in Manchester, spilling a mountain of textbooks and study papers to the floor and announced in a broken voice that he’d had enough of university forever.

A resolute heated indignation had colored Dan’s voice that day with eloquence and urgency as he’d commenced pacing the room.

“I don’t want to do this!” He’d mussed his fringe into a bedraggled mess to match his mood and Phil could only stare after him, unsure of what he meant.

“You don’t want to do what?”

Dan had continued pacing and in his third circuit across the carpet had pointed at the collection of textbooks and notes on the floor.

“I don’t find anything remotely appealing about this at all. I never have! I’m wasting my time and money for a career that’s a failsafe and not even one I might care to pursue once I finish studying. I don’t want to muck about an office sorting bumf all day just because I want to ensure a ‘practical career with a reasonable salary that makes me look like a collected intelligent individual.’ I feel like I’m going through the motions trying to prove myself to someone when I’m left still trying to prove myself to myself. I thought I’d have some vague sense of accomplishment out of pursuing a degree, but I don't. Every time I sit down to read these notes or when I’m in classes I just feel as if I’m getting farther away from the person I wanted to be. I don’t like this- I like making videos, speaking my mind and having it mean something, working my way towards establishing some amount of creative integrity rather than interpreting archaic legal terms that sound as interesting and intellectually stimulating as reading off the ingredients on a cereal box. I’d be more interested in that if I’m honest. I don’t want to do this. Fuck!”

“So don’t do it.” Phil had stared after him, his eyes following Dan’s progress back and forth as if he were watching a metronome.

“What?”

“You’re not enjoying this. Ergo, don’t do it.”

Dan had paused and afforded him a smile that looked too stretched at the corners with grief.  
“You’re supposed to tell me university is worthwhile, that I shouldn’t waste my time idealizing a career built on the assumption that my videos are going to earn traffic enough to be sustainable or that anyone would value that kind of experience on a résumé when a law degree or a master’s in postproduction would be much more relevant. You’re supposed to say, I should work hard and get a more grounded education like you did so I can have something to fall back on if what I want to do doesn’t work out-all the usual sort of advice meant as a cautionary tale to prevent me from dropping out and hating myself even more.”

“If you already know that, you don’t need me to say it.” Phil had shrugged. “You’ve always been more dedicated to filming than to the idea of university, or else you’d still be in a dorm and not sitting here with me debating about it. You’d be a fine lawyer too, if you wanted, only you don’t and if you don’t want to be doing something you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s like me and wanting to be a veterinarian until I found out it was more than I could handle so I didn’t pursue it. I’ve always been quite comfortable with what we’re doing now. It’s versatile, we can use this experience for so much-media, radio, documentaries, books-it can be so many things. Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s like you’re trying to decide between lesser evils when you really only have a problem with one.”

“You see that? That right there?” Dan had pointed at him and turned to do another few paces across the floor. “That’s my problem. Everything feels so simple when I’m with you, everything flows better. I don’t have to tiptoe around you trying to explain myself or put on airs. With you there’s nothing to worry about even if there’s plenty and that’s the problem.”

He’d collapsed back onto the couch and laughed. A bitter pained noise dredged up from the back of his throat. “It’s a problem because what if all this is just me having it too good to see that in the long term I’m making a mistake? You studied, earned multiple degrees that with your experience in filming videos would light up any CV. And I have what? A couple of shit attempts I uploaded and textbooks filled with information I don’t feel like memorizing anymore because I’m not dedicated to the idea of office drudgery when I’d rather do something else, something else I’m not sure I’m particularly good at to begin with. I have one shot at this, just one and I want it to mean something, I want it to be good, I want it to be everything I’ve dreamed of becoming and doing. But nothing is certain. This could all go bad in an instant. We could go our separate ways because shit happens or you become tired of me-”

Phil had made to interject but Dan had only shook his head and continued.

“I’m not saying you will or that I want it to happen, but it’s a possibility I have to keep in mind and even if we never did, who am I to assume that anything I’m doing has even the slightest relevance? Is this just me wanting to leave off college and instead setting myself up for a joke that rides a wake of freak success to ultimately end badly? I have one chance and what if I mess this up? God, I just-It’s my life, but I’ve never felt so small.”

“Tell me I’m worth the trouble,” he appeared to be saying, “tell me I can do this, tell me everything I want to do and be is worth spending time on because I can’t convince myself at this moment, but I think you can. So tell me please, tell me if this is good, tell me if this is one colossal fuck up, because from you it would mean something.”  
“I don’t know what to do,” that look had said, “please, I don’t know what to do.”

Phil had floundered in silence for an appropriate response, too many things crowding in his head for importance to say. His confidence in Dan had never been in question, but faced with the knowledge that Dan lacked confidence in himself, his abilities and his future, Phil had discovered there weren’t quite words or platitudes enough to provide an adequate response. 

How did one reflect the best of a person back to themselves in a way that was meaningful and effective and not lost to pretense or misunderstanding?  
In the end he had gone to the kitchen and shortly returned with two mugs of hot chocolate, rich and sweet- a simple drink to soothe the silence and warm their throats until the right words came to mind.

“This is what I know,” he had begun as Dan looked down into the swirls of chocolate and milk revolving past the froth on his coffee. “I know you’re exceptionally talented at what you do and I know you’re very brave. That’s a fact. You’ve never done anything by halves, because when I said you’d be brilliant at making videos on youtube, you made do with what little you had and you tried. Now you’re here with BBC radio inviting us to host a two hour special and who knows what other opportunities are waiting beyond that. I can’t tell you what you should do, but maybe a year off from uni might help to decide whether there’s any point in going back or not. Nothing about the future is certain, but whatever you do or decide to be from here, with or without me, it’ll be fine.”

Phil had left out the part about how proud he felt to share in their success, that Dan had made the active choice to film and live together and that even if they were to go their separate ways a part of him would forever have a place at his side. It had been a sentiment too strong for him to voice with any confidence and he had only watched as Dan responded to his encouragement like paper bending and twisting under flame until entirely consumed, his face still distantly worried, but brighter and more at ease. He had begun to speak at length about his unsettled anxiety of the future and Phil had been content to listen, knowing at that moment it was all Dan had needed. And although the conversation had not been one that invited him as an active participant at all times, when some words faltered out into technicalities and syllogisms Phil didn’t have his head wrapped around completely to reciprocate with helpful criticism or acceptance, he’d remained complacent on the couch, giving Dan his full attention for however long it was needed, just as they had done since they’d first met on webcams, skyping into the longest hours of the evening when they’d dragged their bodies out of bed the next morning, bone tired yet happy for all of that, satisfied and vaguely electric from a night spent in the company of someone miles apart and as close as a click on their computer.

In the muddled darkness of the bedroom, with years of accomplishment and little more than a few feet between them, Phil sees the same plea for understanding etched on Dan’s face and this time he’s at a loss to understand why or how to help.

“Dan, what is going on?”

“I’m fine. It’s fine.”

Dan’s bloodshot eyes however tell a different story and a creeping suspicion dawns on Phil that there’s a secret here he isn’t being told, something more crucial that speaks to the way Dan avoids looking at him directly.

“Why do you have your jacket on?”

Phil notes the deliberate change of subject and allows it to slide, for now. “I only just came home. I told you, I was worried when you didn’t answer me that night you said you were stepping out. Would have been here earlier if it wasn’t for the train breaking down midway.”

“What time is it?”

“About sevenish now, I think? I thought we’d be stuck on the tracks forever.” Phil knows they’re both aware of playing the avoidance game and he decides to play along until Dan is more properly awake. When he announces the time, Dan lets out a sigh of relief and musses his fringe before looking up with faint scorn at the ringlets of hair in his hand.

“So you…” Dan adjusts his posture to sit up properly on the bed. “So you cut your family holiday short to check on me because I didn’t text you back?”

“No one had any idea where you were or what had happened and I couldn’t stay at my parent’s just wondering without knowing for sure. I didn’t know what to think. What happened to you?” 

“Nothing.” Dan responds too quickly and catches himself before continuing. “It was nothing. I came home after meeting up with Louise. I felt poorly and crashed here.”

“You felt poorly right after your last text. For two days. With your windows covered up and my bedcovers on your bed.”

“Can I apply for legal aid before you cross-examine me? Yes, alright? I just…wasn’t myself.”

“No, I suppose not.”

Phil takes in Dan’s appearance for the first time and notices the clothing he’s wearing is the same he had on the day of his planned outing with Louise, but the shirt looks as if it’s seen better days, the entirety of it rumpled and stained with a tear at the collar as if Dan had been in a brawl. It’s an unlikely scenario and other than a few smudges of dirt across his cheek, Dan looks otherwise unscathed, without bruises or cuts to hint at a scuffle.

He peers closer and notices something attached to Dan’s shirt sleeve. It’s a tattered dark red scrap that in the dim light appears almost black. He’s not sure what it is and automatically leans forward to gently pick it off until Dan turns his head with a sudden swiftness that draws Phil up short.

_I thought he was going to bite me._

It’s a perception that doesn’t entirely disappear when he sees the way Dan narrows his eyes and oscillates his head with a slow ophidian manner, sniffing the air as if trying to savor a scent and pick out exactly what it is. Phil briefly wonders if his encounter with the old man had made some of his more ‘fragrant’ qualities rub off, but Dan continues to close in with a half lidded expression of pleasure that suggests he smells something else entirely. There’s a rapt intensity to his gaze and a dreaming expression to his slightly parted mouth that makes Phil wonder if he might not still be a bit drunk.

His stare is so overwhelming Phil has the urge to say, just kiss me and get it over with, as a lightly meant joke he’s sure Dan will fluster over with a flippant comment meant to turn the room’s atmosphere into less turbulent waters, but as he opens his mouth to deliver the line, he stops and remembers he’d said the exact same words once before, years ago, when he was still living at his parent’s and Dan had come over for a weekend, the both of them sat side by side on the floor of his room reviewing a board game they’d wanted to try.

Phil couldn’t remember how exactly they’d arrived at the kiss, he had only glanced up from the instructions to find Dan looking at him fixedly in a manner that had made him suddenly uninterested in learning how to play. It had happened off and on throughout their weekend get-togethers, a private game of hot and cold in which he would catch Dan staring with an intense quiet interest only for him to look away as soon as he was caught out. When Phil had caught him at it again he’d told Dan to kiss him without meaning a serious provocation, but as with most dares, Dan had taken on a grim-jawed ‘to hell with it’ expression, and quickly leaned in to kiss him soundly on the mouth.  
Phil had never been sure how intimacy could be quantified in a way that went about adequately expressing what it felt like to be kissed when it meant something more than just a fumbling grasp in the dark, when it was exchanged between people who had given up with words and hoped the touch of proximity might impart their affections better. He’d read numerous iterations in books about all the metaphorical fireworks and flashes of light that kisses were meant to encompass, as if they were things of pomp and circumstance, of roaring sound and vivid color, but when Dan had kissed him there had been nothing but silence, deafening and perfect. A slow curling burn had snaked its way through his stomach and into his chest, seizing his breath until all he could think was, ‘ _oh…_ ’ Like a light bulb flash of awareness, a point of singularity, there and gone again, in which the universe and its purpose had been neatly summarized by nothing more than the lingering pressure and glide of Dan’s mouth over his own.

It had finished all too soon and when Dan had receded a question hung over his head, a wide eyed solemn look on his face that said, “maybe I messed this up, maybe this isn’t what you wanted-did you- I’m not sure-” and before Phil could watch uncertainty replace the look of determination in Dan’s eyes he had leant forward to offer a kiss of his own in another bid to feel the taste of that perfect silence again.

They’d sat there in the calm quiet of his room carefully kissing, neither of them particularly skilled or able to care much either way. Lightly grazing teeth and nudging mouths had given way to a dialogue of caresses and furtive touches that never graduated to anything heavier than they’d been quite ready for, but with every kiss and slow pass of a hand along his back the heat collecting at the base of Phil’s throat had grown and spread through his chest like a burning coal between his ribs. It hadn’t been just the thrill of having kissed Dan, but of how Dan had responded, the way they usually responded to each other like mutual catalysts that sparked and burned and played off each other’s energy intuitively. Love had always been an essential truth between them, love between friends who trusted and supported each other, an essential tether of affection Phil had never thought to question, he had only been surprised at how quickly the definition had taken on different inflections of meaning he’d never considered, surprised with how deliberately sensuous Dan’s movements could be, fingers pressing down warm and feather light on his shoulders, careful, so careful as if one wrong move could do irrevocable damage. A kiss that had begun as a dare had taken on greater importance and when they’d finally pulled apart to gauge each other’s reactions their cheeks had been flushed and red, their chests slowly heaving for air, broad smiles on their faces to show that not only was it alright, they’d wanted to do it again and soon, to reciprocate whatever had started between them.

However, whatever had started between them or had been on the verge of becoming, had quickly stalled and cooled in the wake of their growing responsibilities. There was no conversation, no attempt to sit down and study the implications of what they had done, only a mutual silent agreement to go forward as the friends they had always been instead of complicating matters with a more pronounced intimacy they struggled to define.

‘Whatever you’re comfortable with, whatever you want,’ it had been their consensus from the beginning, but at the time, Phil hadn’t been sure exactly what he wanted and so he’d allowed the moment to slip away without resolution. In the months following their impromptu kiss however, the memory would occasionally resurface, glancing across Phil’s thoughts with a gentle interruption in the middle of pouring milk for cereal or editing a video. He’d idly run a finger across his bottom lip, the ghostly sensation of Dan’s mouth still lingering there in a tingling reminder and he’d wonder at how it was that all past kisses and embraces had fallen short, and yet, with Dan the pieces had slot together exquisitely. 

What did you call that, he’d wondered, what did you call it when love felt like something more, when the sensation felt like a good warm blanket that you could wrap around yourself and revel in it to the exclusion of all else? What did you call it when someone had the ability to make you feel like that? What did you call it when you didn’t know what to do about it or why?

He would later find the same questions reflected in the covert glances Dan gave when he thought Phil wasn’t looking or in the thoughtful way Dan’s hand lingered close to his own when they were sat on the couch or jostling for space while cooking in the kitchen-an unanswered row of questions between them neither had been ready to address.

As he stares at Dan, uncertain why the same loaded stare has settled on his face so suddenly without warning, Phil remembers a phrase Cat had told him once, when their conversation had somehow led to them exchanging strange cultural aphorisms. She had been fascinated by a few old English sayings Phil had told her and responded with a Spanish one he had never heard before.

“Donde hubo fuego, cenizas quedan.”

“What does it mean?”

“Literally translated, it means, where there was once fire ashes remain.”

“Well, obviously,” he’d quipped, prompting Cat to raise her eyebrows in a wry expression.

“Yes, obviously, if you mean it literally, but figuratively it means that even when someone turns away from a great love there’s a residual affinity for it left behind. You know, like an interest that doesn’t burn as hot as it used to because either that love wasn’t allowed to properly develop or things just never worked out, but it still has the potential to spark up again from the ashes. Like loving someone with this profound intensity before it fizzles out abruptly, but coming back to them years later, just looking at them and knowing it wouldn’t take a lot for that affection to burn just as bright again."

At the time, Phil had decided perhaps he understood its meaning better than he’d first thought.

Unanswered questions; unfinished business.

Now however, watching Dan incline ever nearer, with a feral look in his eyes as if the conscious part of him had clocked out for the day leaving nothing but automatic instinct in its place, Phil isn’t sure if this is the rekindled flame of intimacy the phrase had meant to imply.

There’s a calculated grace to Dan’s movements that seems more predatory than amorous and makes Phil think of a lion on the hunt, with shoulder blades dipping and rolling through the tall grass after prey.

He’s suddenly uncomfortable. It’s too intense, too strange. This is nothing like what had once passed between them in his bedroom years ago. This, he thinks, is not quite right.

A motorcycle passes by outside with a roaring cough of its exhaust that startles them both backwards away from each other and causes Dan to crash against the headboard with another painful thud.

“Ah! Christ-!” Dan grits his teeth and grips at the sides of his head. “My brain feels like it got mixed up in a blender.”

“That might be my fault.”

“Oh, right I forgot to thank you for tossing me around like a salt shaker earlier. Appreciate it.” Dan gives a weak smile from beneath a fringe of curled, bed matted hair and just like that the impression of danger is gone.

 _Maybe it really is just me_ , Phil thinks, just this entire day finally taking its toll.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you awake like that, but you were a bit out of it. When I came home I didn’t know if you were here and then when I tried to wake you-” He leaves off with a shrug that doesn’t come off as casually as he’d intended and earns him a critical look.

“I told you I’m fine. I’m just tired…and hungry.”

Phil brightens, thankful for an excuse to leave the room and collect his thoughts. “I’ll make us something then. I need some coffee or any kind of hot drink after the train ride I had. There was this weird old man and another man in a business suit who was so angry for the entire duration of the trip. I mean, I understand being frustrated with the delays we had, but there’s such a thing as overdoing it. And, to top it all off, I left my suitcase behind at the station before I even boarded the train and then later I spilled a bag of milkybar buttons all over the floor.”

“Oh, bad luck with the milkybars. Did that mishap involve the weird old man somehow?”

“Sort of. I’ll tell you about it later after we eat something. Actually, I think there might be a few leftovers in the fridge we can have. They got shoved to the back after we stored the groceries away, but it should still be good.”

“No!”

Dan launches off the bed, all former grace gone as his legs tangle up in the drooping waistband of his jeans and his knee collides with the bedside table knocking it to the floor with a crash. 

Phil thinks it’s the most powerful reaction to the mention of leftovers he’s ever seen in his life.

“Er-if you want to order out then that’s okay too.”

“No, not that-I mean, I’m fine, I’ll make something for myself. It’s fine.” Dan gathers up his jeans in one hand and fitfully tugs them back up around his hips. “Not really in the mood for leftovers tonight. Just go make your coffee like you said. I’ll be around.”

“I-right. Okay.”

Phil understands the subtle hint to leave and begins to head towards the door, before pausing to look back at Dan stooping to retrieve the upended table and its contents from the floor.  
“Are you sure you’re alright?”

Once more the yearning expression settles on Dan’s face, a vulnerable look as if he isn’t sure of anything anymore, but isn’t willing to express it openly

“Absolutely. I already told you. I’ll come down and you can tell me how the train ride went.”

“You-uh, have something on your shirt.” Phil points at the object on Dan’s sleeve and Dan looks down quizzically to pluck it away. Now, laying in the open palm of his hand, the lighter contrast of his skin allowing for a better view, the object resembles a large flower petal with a texture similar to crepe paper.

“What is it?”

Dan turns it around between his fingers and says nothing for a few minutes before crushing it in a fist.

“It’s just a reminder.”

He doesn’t clarify further and Phil senses the conversation for the moment is at an end.

“Let me know if you need anything.”

Silence answers him but Phil is sure the offer was heard as he makes his way down the hall to the kitchen. The only thing he has in mind to do after having survived a day he’s sure will provide him enough material for a dozen videos to come, is to make a proper cup of coffee and collapse into the sofa cushions for the rest of the evening. His arrival home and his subsequent discovery of Dan not mired in some international crisis as he had previously imagined was by all accounts anticlimactic and exhausting, but it’s a feeling tempered by the relief of knowing nothing had gone wrong.

His entire body is on autopilot as he sheds his jacket and drapes it on the newel post at the foot of the stairs before heading into the kitchen to prepare the kettle with water. With the excitement of anticipation and dread finally resolved, fatigue begins to weigh him down with the promise that as soon as he turns in for the night he’ll be asleep well past the morning hours of the next day.

_And hopefully no other bad dreams to interrupt me._

He opens the cupboard to select the largest mug they have and busies himself by the sink to wash it. The sounds of running water and the clink of ceramic against the countertop as he sets the mug down are not by themselves extraordinary, but together they make a comforting symphony that is simply ‘home.’ There’s a palpable therapy in the small things, in the mundane things, in the rhythm of the routine. He’s not sure how to define it, but he thinks it must have something to do with the relief after a tragedy just avoided, even if no tragedy had ever been certain to begin with; to come down from the adrenaline rush of worry and fear after being assured that the one you cared about was fine.

“It’s done. There’s nothing more to worry about. No strange tunnel to be lost in, no train to be stuck on, no monster in the dark to hurt me. Just home and coffee.”

A chime from the hall alerts him to a text and he leaves the kettle to boil as he goes to retrieve the phone from his jacket pocket. Once more, it’s his brother sending along a message of concern.

[Checking in again. Not still on the train I hope.]

[No, I just got home a few minutes ago. Dan is here. Everything’s fine. Sorry for not telling you a bit sooner. Just need some downtime to relax.]

[Good to hear Dan’s ok, I’ll tell mom. Had to convince her not to send you a text every thirty seconds wondering if you and Dan were alright. and understood about the downtime, you need it. btw picked up your suitcase at the station. Think I should hold on to it for now or-?]

[I left my shaver and tooth brush in there but it’ll be too much trouble to send it. I’ll just see when I can arrange to come over again and I’ll get it then. Thanks for picking it up for me!]

[No worries. Take care. Talk later.]

Phil stores the phone away again, knowing when he next sees his family, they’ll be curious to hear exactly what had happened with Dan and he knows it will be a question he might not be able to answer with any certainty.

The kettle shrilly announces the arrival of boiled water and he hurries to remove it, thrilled at the prospect of finally being able to fulfill his coffee quest after a long, strenuous day. He’s in such a rush to prepare the sugar and pour the water that his elbow knocks against the mug on the countertop, sending it flying over the edge onto the floor with an explosive crash.

“…Really?”

He stares down, incredulous, a spoon and kettle clutched in each hand as he surveys the destruction at his feet.

Shards of ceramic litter the floor and one tile, the apparent point of impact, has developed a thin spiderweb crack he’ll have to find a way to disguise the next time their landlord arrives for an inspection.

Phil takes time to appreciate that in his haste to enter the house and find Dan he hadn’t removed his shoes, making the impending cleanup a bit safer. They’d taken up the habit of removing their shoes while at home in an effort to avoid tracking dirt across the floors and also because Phil thought it quite pleasant to walk around in socks, while Dan eschewed them completely in favor of trekking across their flat in bare feet. Kitchen detail is the last thing Phil has any energy or enthusiasm for, but with their floor now a hazardous warzone of pointy shrapnel Phil reluctantly admits defeat and sets the kettle down to grab a broom and dustpan to clear up the disaster before either one of them ended up in A&E with a piece of mug stuck to the bottom of their feet.

Everything proceeds smoothly until he finds one particularly jagged piece wedged into a corner of the floor that no amount of bumping around it with the broom manages to dislodge. He kneels down to pinch it carefully between his fingers, but as he reaches forward, his hand slips and the sharp edge slices up into the pad of his ring finger.

“Ah-!” He reels back with a shock of pain and applies pressure, but blood quickly wells up in the groove of the cut to seep a red trail down his palm.

“Really should have ground up those mirrors,” he mutters under his breath as he darts over to the sink to run his hand under cold water.

The cut although small is deep and even as the rush of water cleans the blood away more rises to the surface the minute he takes it out from under the tap. Dark red plumes of his own blood swirl and mix into the drain like strange fish, twisting his stomach into knots at the sight.

_I should probably staunch it with a few paper towels and clean the rest in the bathroom sink instead until I put a plaster on it, he thinks. It’s not so deep that I’d need sutures, but if it continues to bleed like this I may have to visit A &E after all…_

He turns around, one hand covering the offended finger in an effort to stop the flow until he can grab the towels from the counter and is startled to find Dan standing just behind him in the doorway like a silent ghost with disheveled storm tossed hair, staring fixedly at his hand and the thin rivulet of blood tracing a path between the webbing of his fingers.

“I just cut my hand when I was cleaning up the floor,” Phil says quickly in an effort to diminish concern. “It’s a little deep, but I don’t think it’s too bad. I’ll clear the rest of this mess away in a minute, but just watch where you step for now.”

Dan continues to study the blood without a word, a blank mesmerized expression on his face and an intimidating posture to his leaning stance that forces Phil to involuntarily take a step back. The movement catches Dan’s attention and when his head snaps up to meet Phil’s eyes, a heady surge of déjà vu summons up a memory of the nightmare, of the dark and the reek, of a creature Phil now sees mirrored in reality before him.

Dan’s eyes have never been so dilated; the black dot of the pupils almost blots out the brown of his irises in a wide eyed expression of unyielding fascination Phil isn’t comfortable being the subject of. Under the kitchen’s harsher light, Dan’s lips appear severely blanched and chapped with only a faint tinge of pink at their center to hint there actually was blood running beneath the surface of the skin. Even his complexion washes out to a pallid hue that nearly blends in with the walls and the counters, bringing to mind the frost rimed wights of Westeros.

It’s a small relief that his eyes aren’t a piercing ice blue to make the comparison stick, but the juxtaposition of his wide staring dilated eyes in a face three shades paler than Phil remembers it to be is a jarring combination of features that is made more unsettling by his silence.

As Dan remains standing before him, a stolid presence blocking the door, it’s only then Phil is aware just how much Dan has grown, no longer the lanky angular boy he’d once been as if the years had deposited confidence along his spine, straightening his stature and filling him out with muscle mass and strength; a wider smile and strident voice. His nickname of bear has never suited him so well to describe a person formidable of skill and presence, yet wholly benign and warm. Now however, the term takes on different implications, suggestive of a force poised to ravage Phil where he stands. For the first time he understands a little of why people would tell him he never blinked enough. To be caught on the other end of Dan’s strange intense stare is nerve wracking. He can’t tell what might be going through Dan’s head and he has the idea that neither would Dan if asked. There’s a vacuous cunning to his gaze that speaks to impulse only, to an urge absent of conscious thought or reason. It’s a hooded Kubrick stare, as if Dan isn’t so much looking at him but through him to something else with a questionable intent that has nothing to do with love.

“Right, very funny. You can say something now.”  
He’s prepared for Dan to break the act at any minute as he usually did when he teased Phil with a small scare or prank by not moving or speaking to see whose endurance would break first, but this time it feels different and more dire than just a simple game of statue.

In an instant Phil realizes how small their kitchen actually is, how constricted for any lack of exit save for the window shut behind him and Dan in the doorway in front of him, just as it had been in the nightmare when the creature with Dan‘s face had blocked his path forward, leering at him with a jagged lopsided grin. This time there’s nothing keeping them at odds from each other, no wavering beam of sunlight or the assurance that Phil will wake up at the last crucial second in a shuddering heap in a train carriage. The pain humming along his hand at the cut in his finger assures him that he is very much awake and that the danger he perceives might be all too real.

The memory of the disembodied voices in the nightmare clamor up for relevance in his thoughts, echoing, ‘beware’ in a repetitive mantra.

He’s never been scared of Dan and he isn’t sure he is right now, but there is something, an indefinable something, that’s pulling at every hair at the nape of his neck and shuddering its way past his ribcage to make his heart thunder out a pulsing Morse code that screams along the tension of his legs and commands him to run.

“Dan? Come on, it’s a bit creepy now.”

Silence, the empty harrowed look of a message not received. 

Phil is sure now this isn’t a game, not a sly play to rile him up for a scare that Dan will later chortle over. His eyes are a flat canvas of darker thoughts Phil doesn’t want to understand. It’s a look that sits odd and heavy on Dan’s face, Dan who can be somber or sullen, but never murderous as he appears now. More blood seeps down into the lines of Phil’s palm, but he’s certain that if he makes a move towards the door, Dan will not let him leave. Once again it’s purely intuition that guides him, a skill that couldn’t alert him to mishaps before he broke a mug or a camera lens, but could always tell him when a person was being less than forthright or well intentioned. 

A challenge slides between them, an unspoken question of menace in Dan’s arrogant leaning posture as if testing him for a reaction in which the wrong one will yield a grave consequence neither of them might be altogether ready for.

What is wrong with him? He’s not listening to me. What do I do?

He remembers the confrontation on the train between the mother and Frustrated Joe, how matters had been resolved only when she had stood to confront Frustrated Joe’s ire with a challenge of her own.

Passivity in a volatile situation only made matters worse if the aggressor believed they could act without consequence, but Phil disliked the idea of confrontations. As a pacifist by nature and unerringly polite even when faced with situations when the other person was in the wrong he’d choose to apologize and spend the rest of the week stuck in a conundrum of ‘staircase wit’ rather than take on a more aggressive stance. He never suffered slights lightly, but he never openly addressed them either, choosing instead to turn away from harsh words and their speaker in a cool display of polite indifference and decisive silence that Dan oftentimes thought more effective and brutal than outright confrontation. Experience had taught which coping methods worked best for him, but this is one situation he finds he doesn’t have a contingency plan for.

What to do when your best friend suddenly wasn’t themself, wasn’t saying anything and was looking at you as if murder was a salient option?

Faced with no other options, Phil decides the only real way to respond to Dan’s subconscious shove is not to give in, but to push back.

“Dan.” He narrows his eyes and his voice slips an octave to become a command, no longer a question. “That’s enough. Say something.”

Come back to me, he means to say, right now, right now, Dan. Look at me, listen to me.

There is nothing to signal that Dan has heard, but the menace filling the room like a flood of water stalls and Dan’s face takes on the wary hesitance of an animal scenting the air for information.

Say it as if you mean it, Phil admonishes himself, say it in a tone that brooks no argument. Make him listen. Because if he doesn’t-if he doesn’t I’m not certain I want to find out what happens then.

“Dan. I said **stop**.”

This time Phil’s voice booms through the kitchen in a commanding baritone and Dan startles violently as if he’d touched an electrical socket. Whatever sinister air had pervaded his form dissipates instantly without fanfare and he’s suddenly simply himself again, unimposing for his size, tired and confused.

“What? Phil, are you alright?”

“Me? What is wrong with you?”

“What do you mean what’s wrong with me?

“The way you were looking at me just now, like you wanted to kill me.” 

Phil tries to make light of their tense standoff, but Dan’s head tilts up slowly and to the side and for a bare instant he’s predatory again, honing in on a distant sound or smell only he can detect. Then, just as suddenly as the look had appeared, it disappears again as Dan blinks and grabs the edge of the kitchen counter to steady himself.

‘Sorry, it’s been a long night. I’m still half asleep and just…got lost in thought for a minute.”

 _I’m not sure I want to know what kind of thoughts made you look at me like that_ , Phil thinks. _Do I address what just happened? That was so strange. What is going on with him?_

Dan glances at the hand clutched to Phil’s chest and swallows hard as if noticing it for the first time.

“Oh god, what did you do?”

Phil looks down and is distantly surprised to see his fingers are stained red with blood up to the knuckles and his shirt front is smeared with streaks of the same.

“I-uh, broke a mug.” He gestures dismissively at the floor as he reaches over to snatch a wad of paper towels from the counter and presses it against his hand. “I think that’s the third one this month. Good thing we have an entire museum of them to go around.”

Dan forces a weak laugh and this time Phil is convinced there’s something more at work here than just a matter of him ‘feeling poorly.’ His eyes are still dilated and the hand supporting his weight against the counter is tense and white knuckled. When Dan notices the scrutiny he turns away in a rush to pick up the few remaining shards left on the floor and Phil knows it’s only so that he doesn’t have to make eye contact.

“Look, why don’t you take care of that and I’ll get around to preparing your coffee.” Dan says. “It’ll give me time to make something to eat whilst you patch yourself up before you leak everywhere.”

 _That’s what I was going to do before you decided to play weeping angel in the doorway_ , Phil thinks to himself, but aloud he says, “…Right. What are you going to make?”

Dan mutters a reply under his breath, but Phil doesn’t understand a word.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just this…new soup I wanted to try.”

“Oh. What kind?”

Dan looks at a point somewhere past Phil, eyes searching minutely for the right answer.

“It’s a tomato base recipe. You probably won’t like it.” He continues to gather up pieces in the palm of his hand. “Phil, seriously, that doesn’t look good at all. Go take care of it.”

The tense bow of his spine and his refusal to look at Phil directly translates into one silent plea for him to leave the room immediately. Even if he could find the words to argue against leaving until Dan explained himself, Phil can’t find the means to right then, not with his hand in stinging agony and his palm sticky and wet with blood.

“I’ll put your coffee in the lounge for when you’re done.” Dan waves him on his way. “Phil, go.”

Phil silently complies, skirting a path around where Dan hunches on the floor cleaning up the last remaining shards with focused attention. He doesn’t leave fast enough however and a droplet of blood falls from his finger onto the white tiles, a tiny speck of red in a sea of white that causes Dan’s shoulders to twitch as his head slowly turns to look at it.

The tension returns, a spine itching, nape tingling pressure that settles uncomfortably in the air, heavier than the high noon humidity of a summer’s day, but even with the doorway free and clear Phil is momentarily transfixed by the sight of Dan bending slowly sideways towards the droplet with one outstretched hand as if he means to daub it up with his fingers.

_Incorrigible hunger._

Phil’s heel grinds down on a shard of ceramic and the resulting snapping crunch breaks Dan’s stupor, drawing out a choked gasp as he snatches his hand back from the spot on the floor.

“Just go!”

Dan forces the words between gritted teeth and Phil all but flees the kitchen down the stairs.

He slams the door behind him without meaning to, as if Dan were on his heels with that fathoms deep stare still on his face and he’s unaware of breathing hard through his mouth until he hears each raspy inhalation echo off the bathroom tiles. It takes a few minutes longer to collect himself, but even when his breath calms his pulse continues to roar in his ears and drum past his chest.

_I’m fine, everything’s fine. But-what was that just now?_

His hand stings, demanding attention and he leans forward over the basin to rinse off his hands under the tap, fingers shaking as he determines to think of nothing else except scrubbing his palms clean and placing a plaster over the wound.

Dan had his small quirks that Phil had long since accepted as part and parcel to his character, from practicing possible replies to conversations alone in his room to shoving junk mail and hangers behind any available piece of furniture when he was less than enthused about tidying, but he’s not sure he can reconcile Dan’s current behavior with anything that could be called normal even if he considered normalcy itself to be relative.

 _It’s not just me being tired_ , he thinks as he dabs a piece of gauze over the cut and shakily secures it with a plaster. _He said the truth when he admitted not being himself, but what exactly is going on then?_

He glances at himself in the mirror to see what toll the aftermath of his day had taken on his appearance and is dismayed to find his shirt front besmirched with blood.

_Just like in the dream. When I wiped my hands against my jumper and it looked just like this._

He wasn’t sure he ascribed to his grandmother’s belief that dreams held portents of the future, but right then, between the blood on his shirt, the incident in the kitchen and the lingering mystery about what had happened to Dan the night he’d ceased all communication, Phil finds himself willing to consider any possibility in the absence of anything else that made sense right now.

When he emerges from the bathroom he makes his way to the lounge and hesitates for a moment in the hall to listen to the sounds of metal pots clanging in preparation of whatever tomato based soup recipe Dan had wanted to try. There’s still so much he wants to say, to ask, to see if Dan truly was as alright as he claimed, but the electric vibe in the air warns Phil away from heading back into the kitchen to investigate. It had been a long day for both of them and he thinks allowing Dan some space before confronting him about an evening he didn’t seem all too eager to embrace as a topic of conversation might be better than imposing on him once more.

Just let him wake up on his own, let him eat something and relax. Just give it time, Phil thinks and on the heels of that thought the old man from the train interjects into his thoughts to warn, ‘no time, no time.’

_That’s it. I’m done. No more. I’m going to drink my coffee, enjoy the rest of the evening sat on the couch until I doze off and forget this night of broken mugs, delayed train rides and strange standoffs ever happened at all._

So thinking, he heads off into the lounge to find a small plate balanced on the armrest of the sofa containing a large mug of steaming coffee and a few biscuits neatly arranged around it in a semi-circle. It’s a small detail that holds a note of apology in its deliberate setting and quick preparation and he can’t help but to smile.

He plops down into the cushions and immediately wraps his hands around the mug to take a sip. It’s good and hot and sweet-made exactly how he liked it with the perfect ratio of coffee to milk. He dunks a biscuit in and waits for the right moment to remove it, right when its consistency lingered at the edge of collapsing under its own weight back into the bottom of the mug. The taste of it melts in his mouth and he relaxes further into the back of the sofa with a sigh.

For a time the only sounds filtering through the flat are the intermittent clang of a pot on the stove and the rushing hiss of the tap. He idly listens for a minute before fishing out the remote from behind a cushion and switching on the TV, not particularly interested in any program, but merely searching for something to further drone out his worries with background noise that didn’t need his full attention.

The news overtakes the screen and he leaves it there, content to drift between weather reports and traffic updates as he savors his drink.

He’s on his fourth coffee laden biscuit when he notices the plant on the table for the first time.

_Oh, that’s new._

It’s not any type he immediately recognizes, certainly not a cactus or a fern and the intrigue leaves him abandoning his plate to investigate the new leafy addition to their flat. The bag it was packaged in lies next to it on the table and he examines the name of the florist shop for a minute before picking up the plant for a better look. It’s a strange little thing, like a miniature tree with a braided trunk intertwining up and around to end in a profusion of vibrant green leaves.

_It’s actually very cute- well, in so much as plants have the ability to look cute I suppose. He must have bought this while I was away, but when would he have had time to? Then again, I thought Dan had enough of houseplants for now…_

Over the years they’d managed to acquire a growing collection of cacti and ferns that Dan usually exasperated over in the fear that they would either overwater or underwater them leaving them to die. Their travels and commitments left little time to properly take care of a goldfish, let alone the expanding gallery of flora they currently owned. The only saving grace was that the plants were hardy varieties that tolerated meager amounts of water and could forgive the occasional lapse of care. If left unchecked Phil would have easily seen fit to make the flat into a version of Babylon’s hanging gardens and it was only after schooling his self-restraint that he’d managed to restrain the urge. Every so often however, he’d find a particularly beautiful variety he’d imagine adding to the lounge or hallway for an added accent of color and would ultimately have to convince himself to leave the store without it. That Dan had now bought another one without saying anything was strange.

His curiosity is too overwhelming to wait for Dan to enter the lounge and so, unthinkingly, he heads to the kitchen, plant in hand, to ask about it.

“It would be one thing if I understood what the hell is happening, but I can’t control it, I don’t know how yet.”

Phil stops short at the sound of Dan’s voice issuing from the kitchen in a low droning mutter. He can barely make out the long running stream of consciousness, but a few words are clearly audible.

“This isn’t right-this isn’t right. God, how sick is this? I should have asked more questions before he left, but how was I supposed to know it was going to feel like this? This is happening too fast. I can’t believe this is happening at all. Then he comes back and it’s all pushing to the surface and suddenly I just want more and he’s standing there and all I can think of is how easy it would be to just-Oh fuck. Fuck. Maybe if I just have this it’ll go away until-but there’s no way I could-I’ve never- I’m not-”

The rest dissolves into an unintelligible mess until his voice abruptly cuts off into silence.

Whatever soup Dan is making smells like nothing at all appetizing. An acrid smell wafts out into the hall, wrinkling Phil’s nose and leaving him with the urge to throw open every window in the flat. He carefully walks up to the doorway and peers in to see Dan standing before the stove, leaning over a makeshift bain-marie he’s set up on the burner. The smell is more overwhelming in the kitchen and Phil resists an urge to gag on the fumes. He’s prepared to ask just what kind of soup exactly Dan is making, if it might not be something more suited to bubble inside a cauldron than a pot on the stove, until he sees Dan abruptly dip his fingers into the simmering concoction.

If the heat bothers him at all he doesn’t so much as flinch and when Dan removes his hand the tips of his fingers are dripping with dark red lines like melted chocolate. Phil can only watch, stunned, as Dan slowly licks them clean, running his fingers up to the knuckles across his tongue in slow methodical passes that makes Phil clench his teeth. It feels dangerous to watch somehow, as if he’s playing the part of unbidden voyeur witnessing a more lurid act than just Dan exhibiting a love for the taste of whatever strange meal he’s prepared. Phil is too mired in curiosity to move away and he continues to stare as Dan savors the liquid he’s drawn up on his fingers with single minded indulgence as if it were fine claret, tongue flitting out to chase each and every last scarlet rill until it’s gone.

A few drops escape his mouth and spill down his chin that he haphazardly tries to clean with the back of his hand leaving a noticeable smear behind. When he’s done, without a moment’s hesitation, he dips his fingers in to the pot again, scooping up an amount that turns his hand into a red glove. This time when he passes his hand over his mouth and across his tongue he lets out a languorous, breathy moan, a drawn out shuddering whisper of pleasure that trickles along Phil’s spine and turns the grip around the plant in his hands into a numbing vice.

When he’s finished with the second helping Dan leans down further still, eyes heavy lidded, his head hovering just over the steaming liquid and Phil realizes he’s poised to lick the contents straight from the pot, tongue trailing over teeth that suddenly appear too large in his mouth, like a lion hunched over a kill licking blood from its muzzle before burying its head between the ribs of the carcass to feed again. At that thought Phil’s nerve breaks and he steps hesitantly into the kitchen to break the thick silence.

“What are you doing?”

Whatever reaction he expected from his question it certainly isn’t the explosive jump that knocks the pot up from the stove to ricochet off the range hood and over the counter. The pot and the bowl balanced on top crash to the floor with a force that sends hot liquid bursting out across the tiled floors, the counters, the blinds and the clear glass door. In one moment the room resembles a triggered Saw trap with splatters and dribbles of red trailing down nearly every surface and when Phil glances up he sees even the ceiling hasn’t escaped unscathed with a fine spray dotting the surface like abstract pointillism.

_Cracks in the tiles are one thing, but how are we supposed to explain this to our landlord if it doesn’t wash out? God, what was he making?_

Dan stands immobile in the center of the room, thick rivulets of red decorating the pale bared skin of his arms and face, his cheeks stained with smears like morbid war paint.

_It looks like blood._

Phil blinks, unable to say anything and Dan merely stares back at him with eyes hugely dilated and mortified. He’s breathing hard, hand frozen before his mouth as if he meant to lick it clean again and a bit of the liquid trickles down the corner of his mouth in a slow thick trail that beads and drips off the edge of his chin.

“Dan-what on earth?”

In a flash the look of vulnerability on Dan’s face is replaced by a paroxysm of gritted red stained teeth and lips pulled up into a severe grimace like a snarl.

“You just have a skill for ruining everything, don’t you?” His voice is graveled and vicious, the muscles of his neck standing out in tense cords beneath his skin. “Everything was fine, I told you everything was fine and then you have to come back and ruin it! I told you to get out! Are you deaf or just thick? You couldn’t possibly be that useless!”

“Dan-”

“Fuck off!”

A profound silence follows this outburst and crackles through the room like static. For a time, all Phil can do is stare, numb by the sight of Dan pale and wrathful in front of him while liquid quietly patters into puddles on the floor. If the silence were any more palpable Phil thinks he might be able to reach up and coil it around his wrist and for a moment he wishes he could, to twist it up and store it away with the rest of the their boxed collection of wires, let it tangle up and knot itself in seclusion far from where they now stand with the conflicted tension creeping up around his shoulders, threatening to drown him under the strain.

The nightmare, the train ride, Dan’s bitter anger compounded by a migraine that announces its arrival once more with a biting throb behind his eyes- it’s all too much at once to take and he abruptly resolves that he’s had his fill of confrontations for the day.

He’s barely aware of moving backwards, away from Dan and the macabre setting of their kitchen, tracing a path to the foot of the stairs in a quiet daze as he sets the plant down on the radiator in exchange for his jacket. Without breaking stride while he slips his arms into the sleeves, he heads down the stairs, keys in hand, out the door and into the cool drizzled London night.

### ❧❧❧❧

He has no destination in mind. He needs to walk, to clear his mind, to vacate a house that’s suddenly less of a sanctuary and more of a battle zone. Phil can’t say if absence truly did make the heart grow fonder, but as he heads down the pavement he thinks perhaps it might be best for them both if he spent a little more time up North than originally planned.

A part of him is certain Dan hardly meant what he had said in the kitchen. The heat of the moment borne out of a frustration Phil couldn’t understand had made words come together in a messy jumble of sentiment that spoke more for the concern and fright in Dan’s eyes than anything based in pure, intentional cruelty. At least he hoped so. 

Intentional or not, it had been a jarring, unexpected blow that not even retreating to the lounge or his room for the rest of the evening would have remedied.

Rain dribbles down onto his shoulders and hair, quickly soaking him through without an umbrella to keep the downpour away, but he can’t find the means to care. He simply wants to lose himself in all the distractions London had to offer, to drift in the mundane rhythm of car horns and idling buses and throngs of evening revelers heading to pubs and restaurants with friends in tow. His mind hums along with the activity, trying hard to focus on nothing except the world of a city going on with business as usual around him, but it’s not a task he’s completely successful at when, without warning, a passerby going in the opposite direction bodily collides with him, jarring him from his thoughts and sending him stumbling against a wall.

“Maybe watch where you’re going,” the man says without stopping.

“Sorry, sorry!” The reply escapes Phil’s mouth in a reflex as he adjusts his jacket and runs a hand through his hair before proceeding on.

It’s a small mishap that only further serves to jar his nerves and when the warmly lit storefront of a Starbucks looms up to offer a reprieve from the rain he seizes the opportunity to duck inside.

He encounters a number of evening patrons idly chatting at tables or browsing laptops, all of them convened with the same idea in mind as Phil, to seek a brief respite from the rain soaked evening by way of conversation and flavored coffee. Although his taste for hot drinks has waned considerably since leaving the house, with nowhere else to go and little enthusiasm for aimlessly wandering around London for the rest of the night, Phil stands on line to order something just to have an excuse to sit down at a table for a time and clear his mind before having to return home.

The queue is long enough that he has a considerable wait ahead and as he examines the possibilities of what he’d like to have before it’s his turn, he overhears two people seated at a table mention his name.

“It’s him isn’t it? That guy from the radio?” One of their number, a young woman with dark hair gathered up into a coiled plait glistening with tiny droplets of rain glances at him over the rim of her cup.

“Who? The one with the-” The young man in glasses and a red fleece shirt seated next to her subtly follows the direction of her gaze.

“Fringe, yeah. He’s also a vlogger on YouTube.”

“Right, right. Amazingphil. My sister loves him.”

“Yeah, I seen him.” The third in their company, another man dressed in a black bomber jacket purses his lips and looks over in flat disinterest. “Can’t see the allure really, unless you count sex appeal and even that’s questionable unless you’re a certain age.”

“Oh, excuse me.” The woman leaves off her drink with a smirk. “I didn’t know you were a critic for the Daily Mirror now.”

“Come on, it’s obvious innit? You tell me what’s so extraordinary about him then other than his looks.”

“Well, he’s funny. It’s entertaining the way he talks about things-”

“My nan is entertaining the way she talks about things and the family thinks she’s a riot. I don’t see her getting paid for it.”

“Maybe she should make videos then and she might. Christ, Nate, don’t be such a bleeding pessimist for every little thing."

“Nah, I kind of see what he means.” The one in red fleece responds. “Anyone can grab a camera and talk, but only a few make it big with nothing to show for it other than the way they look and those challenges you see everywhere now. You know, mindless entertainment to churn out for easy views.”

The girl ogles him with an incredulous expression before laughing. “Big talk from the one who watches Eastenders and Jeremy Kyle religiously. I’ve seen you between classes, Alex, daytime TV fiend, trying to play it off slick now like you’re above it all with your ‘mindless entertainment.’”

“Oi-! Eastenders is addictive, alright?” Alex flushes a red to match the color of his shirt and hastily takes a sip from his cup.

“Maddie, come on, you know he’s right. I could do the Starbucks challenge right now where I down fifty cups of espresso in one go and people will click just to see what will happen. It’s all the equivalent of stupid pet tricks and people get fame off of that. It’s mental.” Nate shakes his head as he affords Phil an imperious look of disgust.

“You’re both going on about challenges when it’s no better than sitting down at the pub with friends and talking shit or playing games for laughs. It’s really not meant to be more serious than that. Anyway, from what I remember when I saw his videos it had very little to do with challenges. I just think he’s enjoyable to watch.”

“You’re a girl, of course you think that way about him.” Nate adjusts the collar of his jacket and waves her off. “Give them a pretty face and striking eyes and they’re off to the races with a herd of women screaming their path clear without having to contribute anything else. Lucky bastard really.”

Maddie’s head slowly inclines up to shoot him a narrowed withering stare.

“You’re going to tell me I’m wrong? That he got anywhere he is right now because he has conversations with stuffed toys in his bedroom and makes animal noises at the screen and not because a million or so girls all collectively decided he was the fittest thing they’d ever seen outside of a primary classroom?”

“If this is a cry for help because you have self-esteem issues after being passed over for the main part in the school play that one time, I understand, Nate. It’s okay.”

“Oh come off it-”

“You come off it. Christ’s sake, I only pointed him out because I recognized him- you want to make it personal. Maybe his content actually has merit on its own right and that’s why he has the following he does after all this time and not for whatever superficial reasons you think. I don’t know what highbrow standards you’re working off of, but not everything can be breakdowns of beat poets and Fight Club.”

“Maybe it would be better if it was,” Nate mutters.

“Oh my god-”

“I’m just saying-I don’t get it. No, listen to me, Youtube’s a bastion for talentless hacks. You get the odd rarity of genuinely good musicians who break through the fold, but the rest of it is full of people like him and loud gamers. You have the equivalent of what comes down to a vapid, mindless void full of people who are all the same.”

“Shh, shh, not so loud!” Alex gestures at Nate to keep the volume down, while glancing furtively at Phil as if afraid he might overhear and turn around to haul them clear out of their chairs and across the floor, but Nate snorts derisively and continues on in the same tone of voice.

“What- it’s the truth. Whatever it used to be before, now it’s all commercialized ad endorsements with companies using people as mouthpieces to sell their shit until they get wise enough to sell themselves off as the product instead.”

“Not this again.” Maddie closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s more complex than you’re making it out to be. Finding ways to obtain a sustainable income, especially with anything to do with the arts, doesn’t automatically mean ‘selling out.’ Unless you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth or have connections into some elite Oxford secret society I don’t see how anyone’s going to get very far on their own dime without taking advantage of some kind of collaborative sponsorship opportunity. With you it’s always the same. You think it’s all Orwellian politics and Machiavellian designs. The audience he’s gained came on their own, because they wanted to stay, because they liked what he had to show, not just because of the way he looks and not because they were brainwashed by some evil corporate entity mastermind.”

“It’s a fucking show! It’s all about views and easy money. The whole thing is a joke. Look, I don’t go around trying to crap on everyone’s life like you think I do, but it pisses me off when people can get away with this kind of thing and everyone else who actually does have something to say and show rather than sitting on their bed and rambling on about inconsequential shit gets swept under the carpet.”

“I don’t know, mate, he’s not bad as all that,” Alex says, “and it’s not all inconsequential shit. This just sounds like sour grapes because your own videos didn’t net too many views.” 

“Oh, real nice. Take her side now.”

“This isn’t about sides, I thought we were just talking. I see what you both mean, but you’re trying to argue as if he doesn’t have a right to be where he is now only because you don’t agree with the way he makes his videos. I mean, content is always varied when it comes to media

“It’s oversaturation of the same bullshit ad infitinum. What variation are you seeing, because anyone that breaks the mold with something based in original thought for a change doesn’t get half the recognition they deserve.”

“And what, that’s his fault? People have trends and fads and-I don’t know-it gets reflected in the stuff they like to watch. This bloke’s been creating videos for so long he’s practically the godfather of Youtube at this point and for someone who’s managed this far on their own without the benefit of a studio and managed to land hosting deals on radio and TV while staying relevant all this time without one bad word said against him- I say hat’s off to him really. I mean, I hear you about the recycled content and the ad deals, but unless it’s the kind of toxic shit that gets people hurt I don’t know that there’s any wrong or right way to go about making films or videos.”

Alex looks away from Nate’s disapproving frown and takes a long draught of his drink before continuing. “Anyway, you’re going on about originality and he has it in spades. I watched his videos way back when he first started and I liked his vibe. Just the most absurd amusing stuff-used to remind me of that show-god, what was it it-I keep forgetting the name. It used to be on Channel 4-this late night comedy horror show made by Richard Ayoade.”

“Oh, I know that one!” Maddie brightens. “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace?”

“Yeah, yeah. A lot of his early stuff had that kind of tongue in cheek, surreal dark humor lightly mixed in-It’s a bit different now, tailored for a different audience, but it’s still unique. I don’t see anyone going about their videos in the same way he does.”

Nate sucks his teeth and leans back in his chair with arms crossed. “Hopeless. The both of you. You’re already so taken in you can’t see without the rabid attention of his audience making him seem greater than he actually is he’s essentially useless. The other bloke he works with is a dropout whose only talent is being a self- proclaimed fuck up for god’s sake. They’re parasites-bunch of fucking vampires the whole lot of them. Taking and taking without giving anything to show for it. I don’t care what you both say, nothing’s selling me on the idea that he actually contributes anything of value. And I don’t want to hear it about, ‘he’s such an inspiration this and that’- they have those ‘chicken soup for the soul’ books for inspiration-he’s nothing special.”

Alex coughs into his hand, clearly uncomfortable with the direction of conversation as Maddie makes another disgusted face. “Right. I understand. You _really_ don’t like him. Are you done or is there a B-side to this rant we have to listen to next?”

“Look, I’m just saying-”

“I know what you think you’re saying, Nate and one day you’re going to put all your time and effort into making a short film and I guarantee there’ll be a group of people on your arse to give you hell about it, because they either don’t understand it or don’t like it or don’t like you. Doesn’t mean you should stop making films altogether. There’s critiques and then there’s just not liking something for the hell of it.”

“Give it a few more years for people to grow up and move on and they’ll be saying the same thing I am.”

“Or they’ll be making their own videos for you to fume over in your rocking chair.”

“Guys…”Alex interjects in an effort to turn the tide of conversation towards a more placid subject and through it all, as their voices die down to disgruntled murmurs, Phil continues to focus his attention on the menu board over the counter with a fixated stare that blurs the names and prices of items together into a white haze until he realizes enough to blink.

Over time he’d learned the art of developing a thick skin, especially on the internet where comments ranged from one word epithets to paragraph long gripes. Youtube came with its own pitfalls and challenges, usually in the form of people flaunting subjective opinions about his preferred profession as if they were irrefutable truths. Nate’s argument isn’t by itself bothersome or unfamiliar. Usually he responded to such accusations with little more than a dismissive shrug while soldiering on, as he had always believed that whatever perspective others formed about his life could never compare to his own, but now, with Dan’s explosive rage still fresh in his mind and a migraine clamping down around his temples, he finds his objectivity isn’t as watertight.

“Useless, parasitic, without value, nothing special-” the conversation he’d overheard mixes with Dan’s words and he frowns, thinking how odd it was that when in a small state of turmoil the things that usually never bothered him suddenly did; Odder still how a scathing remark voiced by a stranger never hurt, but when echoed by a friend the same words suddenly left indelible scars.

He doesn’t realize how lost in thought he truly is until the person in line behind him lightly taps his shoulder and says, “Sir? You’re next.”

“Oh, sorry, not sure what I want yet. I’ll just-” He steps off to the side and lingers with the intention of filing to the back of the queue to try again and order, but fatigue and a loss of appetite veers his path towards the exit instead, back outside into the light downpour.

_Walk. Just walk._

It’s what usually calmed his impatience and cleared his creative blocks, but the current emotion frazzling his nerves is like nothing he’s experienced before. It’s one part worry and one part frustration, chased by a note of fear that he doesn’t understand. He’s suddenly sick of the rain and the grey and bleak obscure thoughts and if given the chance he thinks he would exchange his current panorama for vibrant color and heat and laughter instead-for a moment in time when he and Dan lingered side by side at the edge of a beach in a tropical clime with the surf pulling at their feet and palm fronds tossing in the sunlit air above their heads; For a moment in time when everything had been blue and uncertain but happy for all of that, with none of this strange doubt currently pulling his thoughts into disarray.

A part of it is the migraine elevating every slight noise to a point of aggravation, until even the rain filtered glare of streetlights bites away at his eyes with an insistence that pulls him up short mid-stride on the pavement to rub the discomfort away.

Immediately, as soon as he stops, a person crashes into his back with a force that nearly sends him stumbling against the wall again and once more, out of reflex he says, “sorry!”

“You say that a lot, don’t you? One would think you’d apologize for your own existence if someone said they took offense at your presence.”

“Sorry?” Phil straightens up to take a better look at the person standing behind him who lets out a short laugh.

“There you are again. You’re unfailingly polite. It’s not the worst habit, but after so long I can’t say I still abide by that old British tradition. I must tell you, I couldn’t believe it when I ran into you again after the station. The second time I thought it might just be a coincidence, but after this incident, well, third time’s the charm as they say.”

“I don’t understand.” 

Phil is sure he’s never seen the man before and as he reviews his memory of the passengers who’d shared his journey on the train, none of them resemble the tall figure with dark slicked back hair standing in front of him. He’s certain he’d remember someone wearing such a formal, sharp three piece suit. The man looks as if he’d just walked out from the pages of a Savile Row fashion shoot with crushed leather gloves on his hands and glossy black oxfords on his feet, topped off with a gold pocket watch trailing across his waistcoat in an open invitation to whatever pickpockets trawled London’s streets for easy opportunities.

The man adjusts the grip on the black umbrella in his hand and offers Phil a brilliant smile. “It’s really not necessary for you to understand. I’m not one for long introductions or explanations, not when the procedure itself is rather quick anyway.”

“Right. Well, I’ll just…go then.”

Phil’s never been quite sure why or how he finds himself either witnessing the eccentricities of strangers or becoming the focus of them, but tonight more than ever, with the rain pouring down around his head and faced with a person whose grin appears too large and false to be anything promising good intentions, he finds himself wanting to beat a hasty retreat.

He makes to turn away, but the man sidesteps in front of him with a glinting flash of eyes that suddenly appear large and dark in his face.

“No, not at all. You’ll stay right where you are.”

Phil frowns. “I don’t think I will.” But when he makes to step around the man he finds himself rooted to the spot, frozen in place with the man’s eyes boring into him with unblinking intensity.

“No, you see, you will, because you have nothing else to do tonight, not with all your anxieties frayed to a threadbare edge. I can see it on your face. You need distraction, you need a reason to forget, and I need a drink. I think we can serve each other’s needs quite well. Come along. If you’ll follow me we can get on with it, but silently, if you please.”

The man extends his umbrella over their heads and Phil finds himself unable to keep from following at the man’s side, compelled to move as if he were being pulled along on invisible strings. It’s a drowsy motivation he has no strength or impulse to fight against and he walks on in perfect silence as they enter a darkened cobblestoned alleyway, away from the brighter thoroughfare of streetlights and passerby.

“Ah, much better.” 

They come to a stop under the oblique shadow of a darkened building’s overhanging roof and the man sets down his umbrella with a flourished twirl.

“I really detest voyeurs, don’t you? Unless you have a mind for that sort of thing. It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve seen so much since I’ve been with the Night Court, you wouldn’t believe the little nasty indulgences they get up to. One of them, Eris, has a thing for young men in knotted cords. It’s an art she learned centuries ago when she lived in Osaka. Kinbaku it’s called. It’s really quite a show the way she goes about it. She once did private shows all around the world. People would book a year in advance just to see her work or be a part of it. With that frame and those eyes, she’d favor you in an instant, use scarlet cords to contrast with that pale skin of yours so like one of us. She’d have you trussed up all lovely on her table as a centerpiece to wonder over. Well, before she gets tired of you I suppose.”

The entire time he speaks the man deftly removes his leather gloves and tucks them away into the pockets of his suit.  
“Eris can be quite vicious when she wants to, but she has delicacy when it comes to her art. I never thought the human body could be put on display in so many wonderful positions, but it all amounts to playing with one’s food in the end and I can’t agree with that. Dispense with the niceties and get on with it I say.”

Phil remains immobile, a part of his mind buzzing and electric with the need to flee, but a larger part of him is held in check by a drowsy contentment to do exactly as the man had suggested him to.

“I wasn’t sure about taking you, you know. Central London has no shortage of delicacies to choose from, but all the crowds usually make me give it a wider berth. If I wasn’t so particular about my choices I’d just take any one of the numbers of vagrants in the underground, if Cameron won’t do a thing about them, then desperate times so on and so forth. But the taste is so dry and the smell-paugh! But you on the other hand-”

The man steps closer and as the dim glow of a far off streetlight slants down across his face Phil notes with a distant sensation of horror that the man’s eyes have become a glossy black to match his shoes.

“You smell like blood. Freshly spilt. And what better kind is there? Here now,” the man reaches out to take Phil’s hand and nudges at the plaster over his finger with a gentle touch that nevertheless sends a piercing jolt of pain through the still fresh wound.

“That’s what really sold the deal for me, to turn a phrase. And after the third time of literally running into you-well, I had to assume fate intervened on my behalf. I’d dispense with the formality of small talk, but I’m not like the small whelps that accost and kill without finesse like the brutes they are, ruining the flavor utterly. Eris uses rope to make the blood run hot and good under the surface, but I’ve found a little conversation helps just as well. Who knew anticipation could lend such a wonderful piquant flow to the taste?”

A cold pale hand seizes Phil’s chin and slowly moves his head to the side, exposing the long column of his throat. Each breath comes hard through his nose and as he tries to move he can’t, utterly entranced by the dark jet eyes holding his gaze.

“Wonderful, wonderful, silently for me, just like that. Perhaps I’m still the traditionalist at heart, when it comes to this anyway. I favor the neck. Good strong vein there with a robust flavour. Now the others might take the wrist or arms, but I find the taste there is so thin and lacking. Now Eris. She favors the thigh. Says it’s quite the rush. Something to do with the way her ropes forces the blood to flow stronger in the veins, sets them ripe and bursting.”

Phil struggles to speak, to call for help and break the uncomfortable chilled grip latched onto his chin, but the best he can manage is a strangled rattle of a sound from the back of his throat.

“Now, now it’s perfectly fine. With the neck there’s hardly any mess at all to worry about. I promise you, it’s all really quite pleasurable after the initial shock of pain.”  
The man opens his mouth to reveal a set of large needle sharp fangs that extend down to touch his bottom lip and all Phil can think is, oh god, with a distant shock of surprise. This is no nightmare, this is real, all too real and this time he’s fully awake and aware of what is about to happen.

Hot breath skates along the skin of his neck and the tingling pressure of pointed teeth settles on the jutting vein of his throat.

Carotid, his mind helpfully supplies, that’s my carotid. And still, he finds he can’t move.

“Wonderful, wonderful,” the man murmurs once more before burying his head against Phil’s neck.

For an instant, the fangs are there, nearly breaking the surface of the skin with a pain that races up Phil’s spine to end in a shock at the base of his head and the next instant the pain is gone as a dark shape barrels into the man sending him hurtling away into the shadows with an anguished yell.

The stupor that had held Phil in check abruptly snaps and leaves him able to move as he stumbles backwards with a gasp, clawing at his neck to wipe away the imprint of cold hands still embedded in his skin.

“Whelp! Miserable child!”

Phil looks over wide-eyed to see a commotion of blurred shapes struggling in the shadows, two tall figures he can’t immediately identify save for the man’s incensed voice echoing into the alleyway.

“Let go of me! That one’s mine! He’s under my thrall, you little fool.” One of the shadowed figures is picked up like a doll and abruptly tossed backwards against the wall with a distinctive crack of bricks and mortar. “Go scavenge elsewhere, rat or I’ll have the court on your heels for this!”

“He’s not yours.”

The figure on the ground shudders and adjusts their stance with a drowsy shake of their head, poised to lunge at the man again and it’s only when Phil hears the voice that he realizes with a shock who it is.

“Dan?”

“He’s not yours I said. Get away from him.” Dan’s voice is low and tremulous with emotion as he stumbles up to his full height, a figure still encased in shadow, his black clothes blending in with the darkness.

“How dare you!” The man reaches out, hands curled into claws that dig into Dan’s shirtfront and hauls him up effortlessly from the floor. “In all my years residing here, I’ve never had to resort to such outrageous behavior. Maybe you don’t know the rules yet or maybe you enjoy courting the idea of a violent death, but when one of our kind has selected their prey you don’t interfere. I admire your gall to confront me when I’m of age and strength enough to pry your head from your shoulders and I would do so in this instant if I was more inclined to deal with the mess. With that in mind…I’ll let this slight pass without incident, but if you insist I’ll have the Night Court tear you into ribbons.”

“I said get away from him.” Dan grabs the man’s hands and through tremendous effort manages to pry them off and away, shoving the man back to stumble against the wall with a sputtering cry of outrage as he steps into a puddle slick with petrol and mud that sloshes over his shoes.

“Dan.” Phil makes to move forward and Dan whirls around, wild eyed and frantic, his face still stained with red smears as he holds up a hand to stop him.

“Don’t move! Just stay where you are. Listen to me. Please.”

For an instant, a heady breathless sensation sweeps over Phil at the sound of Dan’s pleading voice and the look of his eyes, dark and insistent, the same woozy contentment he’d felt when the man had suggested for him to follow and he thinks, ‘yes, I should stay right where I am. That sounds reasonable and preferable. Yes. I’ll listen to him. I’ll stay…’

A droplet of water gathering on his rain soaked fringe falls into his eyes and he startles with a rapid blink that chases the feeling away, leaving him unsteady on his feet. Dan however notices the moment of hypnotic hesitation and looks back puzzled until the man barrels into him with a burst of speed that hurtles them both against the opposite wall of the alley.

“You dare to enthrall him? To make a glamour of the one I told you was already _my_ prey?”

His hand grips the front of Dan’s throat, their faces only inches apart.

“He’s not yours,” Dan repeats and Phil watches in a small daze as the incisors of Dan’s clenched teeth suddenly appear much longer and sharper than normal.

“And what is he then if not mine? Yours?” The man jeers.

“He’s my friend.”

A beat of silence follows in which only the sounds of rain clinking off the nearby awning of a storefront and pinging across the overturned lid of a trash bin resound in the dark alley. They stare at each other, Dan with a look of tired conviction etched on his face and the man with one of consternated disbelief until he abruptly steps back with uproarious laughter.

“Your friend? For a minute I thought you were-oh. Oh yes, I see. You’re quite serious. Your friend.” The man wipes at the corners of his eyes with his hand, fangs still long past the sneering turn of his lips.

“And how many friends, lovers, spouses, and soul mates have I taken over the years and how many still will you drink in your lifetime if you live long enough to tell the story? This is not a game of hearts or a romantic idyll. All is fair game when it comes to death and that’s what we are, death with a human face. Your friend’s life was forfeit to me from the moment I chose him. Besides, he has no mark on him for you to call him your own in any context. We always learn our lessons the hard way. This is one about loss and your incompetence. Understand it now and leave.”

“No. I think you’re the one that doesn’t understand.” Dan grabs the man’s shoulder and pushes him towards the exit of the alley. “I think you’re mistaken. I told you he was my friend and I told you he wasn’t yours and now you’re going to leave.”

“How dare-get your hands-“The man splutters as he finds himself manhandled towards the exit of the alley back to the brighter glare of streetlights and crowds of people beyond.

“I don’t entirely understand what’s happening to me just yet. I’ve never felt this strong and this dangerous in my life and that idea is rearranging everything I thought possible about the universe and myself. I can hardly think straight. Everything is whirls of sound and color and blood and-god, it’s everything all at once, like seeing the world for the first time and knowing there will never be an end to it-” Dan leaves off with a choked sound before collecting himself with a furrow of his brow as he continues to wrangle the man out of the anonymity of the shadows.

“But I can at least understand you don’t like people to see what you really are. That’s dangerous for you-me-us. So if you want to make this an issue, if you want to try and hurt me or him, you’ll have to do it where everyone will see, because I won’t be quiet about it. I promise you. I don’t know anything about the Night Court, but I’ve been told they hate any incident that shines a spotlight on their kind. Our kind. Whatever. London isn’t short on CCTV’s or wayward tourists with camera phones. So the way I see it, if they see you, exactly as you are, I won’t be the only one having to worry about the court.”

“You wouldn’t dare-”

“You keep saying that, but obviously I do.”

“Let go of me.” The man wrenches away from Dan’s grip and yanks his suit jacket back into place, not entirely successful at tugging out the wrinkles creased into the seams of the arms. 

He quickly looks away as a few pedestrians pass by and glance at him curiously from under their umbrellas.

“Cunning brute,” he mutters, “Very well, if that’s the way it’s to be, I’ll bring this matter to the elders myself. I’m sure they’ll be curious to meet the newly turned runt breaking our laws on their doorstep. Then we’ll see how you manage to negotiate your way out of their sights. As for your ‘friend,’ when you're dealt with I’ll be returning to collect. I promise you that.”

He stays long enough to give Dan a considering stare, his mouth stretching into a smile of glinted fangs. “It will be interesting to see how your bravado fails before the court. Interesting indeed. Until then.”

The man gives a mocking bow, before brushing past to disappear around the corner of the alleyway back into London’s bustling evening crowds.

Phil stares, fixated with slight horror as Dan rushes over with a gash along his forehead seeping a freshet of blood across his left brow to mix with the mess that had spilled on him in the kitchen.

“Are you hurt!” Dan seizes him by the shoulders in a tight grip and looks him over. “Did he bite you? Are you-?”

“I’m fine,” Phil says with a calm that belies the panicked canter of his heart. “But you’re hurt, you’re bleeding.”

“Really? Oh...." He passes a hand over his face and looks surprised when his palm comes away stained a livid red. "It’s supposed to heal over quickly. At least according to the only source of information I have. I can hardly feel my heartbeat anymore and I can hear yours, so what’s a little blood loss in comparison to that?”

There’s a shaky lilt to Dan’s rapid speech despite his amused tone that hints at a breakdown waiting in the wings to emerge and Phil’s hands twitch with the singular urge to yank him into an embrace.

This is hardly the time, he thinks, not with the rain now a torrential downpour around them and not with blood mixing with the water to make Dan’s face a grisly sheen of red, but the urge is mired in an instinct he can’t deny and without further hesitation he pulls Dan into his arms and holds him, thinking of nothing else but the act. 

His first thought is that Dan is too cold, far colder than can be explained away by the rain soaking through his clothes. It’s like wrapping his arms around a marble statue and for a moment Dan remains unresponsive like one until his hands twitch hesitantly at Phil’s sides before coming up to wrap around his back. Phil is certain he understands this isn’t a gesture of intimacy meant as a prelude to romance. It simply stands alone as a measure of comfort between them in the absence of any better way to express his relief that they were both okay. Sometimes the warmth of another person, of a loved one, was as essential as water or air and he thinks now a bit of solace is exactly what they neededed to cement the security of each other’s presence in the wake of a crisis only just averted.

Dan withstands the tight embrace for only a minute however, before gently pulling away with a sniffing cough. He takes on an awkward uncomfortable stance, shuffling in place, his throat working in an effort to speak.

“It’s good, you know, the whole-” he makes a vague gesture in the air to signify their embrace, “but being that close to you right now is the top in a list of very bad things for me to do.”

“Dan, just tell me what’s going on.”

“How am I supposed to do that!” Dan’s voice echoes through the alley, as resonant as it had been in the kitchen when he’d snapped with rage, only now his voice is colored with a desperation that turns his eyes glossy and red.

“How am I supposed to tell you what’s happening to me when I don’t even understand it myself? I can hear you. God, I heard you the whole way from the house. I was following you when you left and the entire time it was just the sound of your heart and the smell of your blood and now when you held me all I could think about was how close your throat was to my mouth, to my teeth, and how perfect it would be to-”

He leaves off with a pained noise and passes a hand across his mouth.

“To what?” Phil asks although a part of him is certain he already knows the answer and he sees that Dan realizes as well when he gives a knowing smile, the secret one they shared when they intuitively knew what the other meant without either of them having to say a word to elaborate.

“The problem is I couldn’t convince myself that a part of me didn’t enjoy the idea. Do you know what that is, to realize that? There’s l’appel du vide and then there’s this and I’m not sure there’s enough French colloquialisms in the world to define it. But then…I could only remember the way you looked at me in the kitchen before you left, the way you looked the entire time you were walking away from the house and I just wanted to tell you-I just want to say-I’m sorry.”

“Dan-”

“No. Listen to me. I was almost too late a minute ago, so just- listen to me, please. I lied, I lied. You’re not useless. I’ve never looked at you and seriously thought that you’ve ruined anything to do with my life. It’s the opposite. It always has been. I say shit sometimes-I fuck up and I don’t think and because of that you almost-Please.”

Phil’s not sure if Dan is pleading for him to listen or to forgive, but he thinks it’s possible for him to do both.

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just a bit scared right now, if I’m honest. This whole day has been difficult for me to understand.”

Dan snorts laughter. “I think that’s an understatement for the both of us.”

“We should be calling the police right now instead of just standing around discussing this. None of what just happened was right. Look at what he did to you-”

“No, absolutely not. I may not be entirely aware of what's happening to me, but I know attracting the attention of the police is the exact opposite of what we should do. How would we explain this? Have you considered what that would look like on a report, how you told the officer that you were compelled to follow a guy into an alley who was literally about to sink his fangs into your neck? Or me describing how he knocked me back into a wall and gave me a wound that just happened to heal over in a matter of minutes?”

Phil looks up at Dan’s forehead and notices with a shock that the gashed wound has not only stopped bleeding, it's diminished to a barely noticeable crease in the skin, leaving nothing but dried stains of blood behind to hint that it had been there at all.

No, definitely not normal, he thinks. Definitely not.

“You really need to tell me what’s going on, Dan.”

Dan nods and places his hands over his eyes with a shaky breath. “I’ll try, but I’m not sure you’ll believe me. I’m not sure I believe this all myself.”

“After tonight, I think I’m willing to believe anything. That man- he had fangs and eyes like what I saw before in this dream I had on the train. Eyes like black holes. The same as you…”

At that statement Dan startles visibly. A subtle air of danger still lingers in his darkened stare, a barely repressed promise of hunger and power swimming just beneath the surface of his tired composure, but in that instant he looks so haunted and wretched Phil wishes he could reverse time for only a minute to take back his words and say anything else.

“Home,” Dan says with finality. “Let’s go home and I’ll tell you everything. I promise. But let’s keep to the side streets maybe, away from larger crowds. I really don’t want us appearing in a candid photoset with you looking like a wet cat and me like I stepped out of a horror movie.”

“We could take a cab?”

“No!” Dan appears horrified at the very idea. “That would make it worse. Everything is this overwhelming mess of sensory details right now, but I can take walking over a cab.”

“What do you mean overwhelming?”

“Phil…as hard as it is to focus on things, it would be harder in the backseat of a car where the only focal point would be you, not with how I feel right now."

Phil’s not sure what the expression on his face must look like, but it must be one of pure bewilderment because Dan sighs and turns his head away.

“I’ll go into detail once we’re home, but the only thing you need to know right now is that I’m hungry and there’s one more container at home of that soupy mess which isn’t soup at all and it’s the only thing that’s going to keep me from finishing what that man started.”

“I-right. I think I understand.”

“You really don’t.” Dan smiles and places a hand on his shoulder. “But maybe you will once I explain it. Let’s just go. Please.”

They begin to head down the alley together, Dan cupping the rain in his hands to quickly clean his face off before they emerged back into the scrutiny of the general public, when Phil notices the man’s discarded umbrella still propped up by the side of the wall. He retrieves it and holds it aloft over their heads as Dan stares up at it in weary tolerance.

“It’s not that I mind, but it really doesn’t make a difference at this point.” He points at the messy state of his fringe further tossed into a disarray of sodden curls. Phil knows his own hair is in no better condition with strands limply plastered across his forehead and his clothes now soaked through with water that skates down his neck in chilled trails along his spine.

“Still, if he’s not going to use it anymore, we might as well. It’ll make us less conspicuous than if we didn’t.”

Dan slowly shakes his head and gives a wan smile before silently conceding to walk under the wide arc of the umbrella Phil holds in his hands.

“You know,” Dan murmurs as they make their way back out onto the pavement, “you’re taking this very well for someone who nearly had an impromptu session of acupuncture.” 

“Because you’re here,” Phil immediately responds. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be.”

Dan does a quick double-take and Phil mirrors him, the both of them meeting in the middle of their shared glance with a searching, yearning look before they turn away and continue on down the pavement.

There is a yawning minefield of questions between them to answer, not the least of which includes the answer to the question of what had happened to Dan the night he’d disappeared or what had just happened in the alley. When it came to matters of suspending belief or practicing trust, when he wasn’t immersed in a good movie or book, Phil thinks he was significantly better at practicing one over the other. He only hopes trust itself will be enough to confront whatever other revelations the evening had to offer once they returned home. Trust is all he has, the best he’s ever had to give in all their years together and he thinks perhaps, for now, it might just be enough.

Rain skates off the edges of their umbrella in small waterfalls that drip and pool at their feet and the distant echo of Big Ben tolling the hour engulfs them as they find their path down less populated streets, side by side, quiet and content to head off together towards home.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, I'm very sorry for leaving this story hanging for so long. (Which is part of why I've made this chapter much longer than I otherwise would, so that's it's more two or three chapters in one.) A couple of things came up in the past few months that prevented me from updating this- Mostly health related concerns that had me in and out of hospital for awhile, compounded by a lack of faith in continuing writing this story for various reasons.
> 
> I've never written a fic like this before, at least not one where I had to reconcile the personalities of two very real people in a fantasy setting, a concept which was (and still is) a little jarring and difficult to navigate. Edge of the Universe was written more as a hypothetical meta, this one has those elements too, but it's much more involved.
> 
> Trying to write from Phil's perspective was especially hindering. I tried pinning down certain aspects of his personality in the context of the story's setting and pace, but I kept falling flat (I'm still not happy with the way this chapter turned out) and in between trying to think of how to edit this in a better way that did justice to Phil's persona while keeping the story moving along, I started wondering if I should really be investing this much effort in the first place. There's so much I want to do with this, but at the same time there are certain limitations that are giving me more headaches than I feel I'm actually accomplishing anything that communicates what I want to with this particular story. (If I should be doing it at all in the first place.)
> 
> It's also wordy and more involved than I think most readers like or expect, so I don't know. I'm stubborn in that I want to finish this, but I'm unsure about it too.
> 
> I'm very grateful for all the comments on this work and for all the support I've recieved about my writing in general; it's given me a lot of happiness to see some of the things people have had to say. I don't have plans on abandoning this or my writing as a whole, but just to let you know why I've been away for so long and why I might not be the best at updating this fic on a regular schedule as I'd otherwise like to.
> 
>  
> 
> A few notes on the story itself:
> 
>  
> 
> *I did have a dream of which Dan was in the background and a voice did say, "beware he is Apollo." (I was also riding on the top of the cab of a truck at the time and there was some kind of a musical going on at the side of the road, so- god only knows what that dream was supposed to be about.) I just thought the phrase itself was interesting and decided to include it as it worked well in the context of the theme I'd established in previous chapters with Yilmaz comparing him to Antinous.
> 
> *The mariner's rhyme Phil briefly mentions in the conversation with his brother is an old forecasting method apparently once used by sailors to predict storms at sea, which goes: "red sky at night, sailor's delight. red sky at morning, sailors take warning."
> 
> *Geordie is a wonderful, confusing dialect and I could listen to it for days while not having a clue what's going on. I watched a video on how it developed and converged with other dialects over the years to become what it is and it's all pretty interesting. I didn't want to go overboard with phonetically trying to convey the sound of the words with the cat's speech, as I was afraid it might be too jarring to read.
> 
> *I'd like a bag of milkybars.


	5. >>>A Brief Note<<<

> *******************Edit: On Temporary Hiatus*********************


	6. And Revelations.

My soul and yours are the same,  
You appear in me, I in you,  
We hide in each other.  
-Rumi

On the surface it’s all quite normal. There is nothing about the downpour of rain, the parade of red buses and black cabs or the small crowds of pub goers idling under the shelter of awnings with mobiles and cigarettes in hand to suggest anything different from the warp and weft of what usually constituted another grey evening in London. The weather is overcast, traffic bottlenecks the streets and people come and go according to the rhythm of a city in constant motion. At the same time however, Dan takes in the world around him and thinks nothing has ever been further from the definition of normal.

Everywhere he looks, textures, sounds and lights combine into heady mixtures of sensory overload. There is no such thing as subtlety with large cities, especially not one as old and crowded as London, not with the brightly lit ticker show of adverts in Piccadilly Circus or the great steel and glass monoliths of the Gherkin and the London Eye rising over the skyline to garner the attention of locals and tourists alike, but suddenly every detail of the world around him clamors for importance. Nothing is without wonder. The pinging clatter of raindrops scattering across metal echoes like clarion bells louder than the tones of Big Ben tolling the hour in the distance. Every exhaled breath of a stranger he passes sounds as clear and close as a whisper in his ear and it’s enough for him to imagine that if he tried hard enough he might even be able to hear whatever secrets or dreams they silently harbored in their heads. Colors are heightened to vibrant palettes in which pillar boxes suddenly appeared like installations better suited to starring in the oversaturated tones of an Argento film and yellows and greens merge into bilious stomach churning mixtures. It all makes for a dizzying experience that inflicts him with the barely suppressed urge to dart over to the nearest wall and retch.

The simple act of walking has never been so perilous. It’s all he can do to not stand in place and stare at the ripples of rain pooling on the blacktop as if trying to scry the oil slicked water draining down into the sewer grates for a hidden message. Neon signs dart at his eyes, traffic lights burn instead of glow and the streetlamps blaze with golden auras he’s careful to skirt around or face being momentarily dazzled. Everything is imbued with a distinct life he’d never noticed before, every trash bin, flowerpot and umbrella alive and purposeful with an obscure meaning that draws his attention although he’s aware they’re just commonplace objects, devoid of grandiose designs, yet, with every sense suddenly attuned to notice the most minute details the mundane contains an outrageous beauty he finds himself frenetic and anxious to examine. This, he thinks, is what it would be like to live inside PJ’s imagination, where animism became a reality instead of a concept and where every slight shadow on the wall moved and shuddered with a voice of its own. He’s prepared for PJ himself to turn a corner whilst shouting cut and directing him to stand in a certain way to allow for a better camera angle in which the ‘slippery Lickcil’ could be added hovering over his shoulder in postproduction.

The entire night has been such an absurd sequence of events that he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it was all just an intense lucid dream that would go on to feature as the draft for a storyboard in PJ’s head; But the barrage of sensory minutiae continues without end, roaring and chafing at his thoughts, brought to a peak by the potent blood surging in his veins with a thirst more demanding and terrible than his first night. He would have gone mad by the intensity of it all ages ago if not for a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the world around him in lieu of focusing on the task of arriving safely home where he might be able to glut himself on the one thing he needed to make the riotous vitality of the city dull back to a state of normalcy he could ignore. Home however contains its own complexities and troubles he’s not altogether ready to confront. It’s a worry that offers a helpful distraction even as it constricts his stomach into knots.

_I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. But not right now. The timing isn’t right, my head’s not in the right place. I don’t want to do this, but I have to._

What was it about deadlines and tasks which must be done, Dan thought, that made the idea of accomplishing those things suddenly less appealing? Like wanting to do literally anything else other than picking up a room cluttered beyond recognition or studying for an exam in which equations and formulas were best memorized at the last minute in a pique of late night cramming. Something about feeling obligated versus feeling motivated. On any other occasion he might have called upon his penchant for procrastination and put off the task until he felt more attuned to the idea of dealing with it, but as he walks under the welcoming shelter of the umbrella in Phil’s hand, his arms still tacky with dried blood and tendrils of rain, he knows what he has to address once they arrive home is far beyond the scope of any maths exam or housecleaning routine.

_I have to tell him. There’s no way around it now. I mean, I might as well try to blot out the sun with one finger at this point. He won’t let it go. How could he after what he’s seen? And I already promised to tell him, but I really don’t want to do this. I’m just so tired and so…hungry._

Hunger is an understatement for the craving slipping past his stomach and burning its way along his bones. He’s grappled with mornings full of pancakes and coffee and late evening appetites which only a pizza or a bag of crisps could satisfy, but this is different. It’s a raw and vicious yearning. His entire body strains for sustenance and the barely pulsing organ of his heart aches behind his ribs for a replenished supply of the blood flowing through it, for the same blood he can smell wafting off every passerby as he and Phil make their way towards home. He can hear it too, each heart a thudding symphony so strident and annoying, overtaking even the booming crash of thunder overhead, that he has an urge to stand in the middle of the street and shout for everyone to just be quiet, just shut up and stop living so loudly.

The craving is worse than when he’d first woken up in a conservatory with a newfound instinct for blood he’d struggled to understand. At least then he hadn’t known what the taste would be like before Teague had appeared with a container full to the brim with a flavour that superseded the memory of every food he had ever eaten until he could hardly say what popcorn or chocolate tasted like anymore or if all the meals he had ever prepared were barely edible dishes he had only become accustomed to over time. The blood is everything now. The blood is the life, he thinks and as soon as the quote enters his mind he’s unable to suppress a cringing shudder.

_Oh, wonderful. All I need is the cape and the cliché accent to finish it off. But if we don’t get into the house now where I can have the last bit of what’s left in the fridge I might just have to take a page from the count whether I want to or not._

As soon as he thinks about preparing the last container after the previous debacle which had left the kitchen painted with gore, his mouth waters and the hypnotic tympana of Phil’s heartbeat next to him pounds in his ears like the amped bass on a stereo. The sound combined with the smell of warm blood flowing just under Phil’s skin offers an enticing suggestion that tugs at the last threads of his endurance and Dan bites his lip hard to jar himself out of troublesome thoughts.

He doesn’t dare to so much as look at Phil and instead fixes his gaze on the pavement in front of them, mindful only to keep pace with Phil’s stride until their steps unconsciously sync together as if they were bound, waist to waist, each of them moving as a complete unit in concert with the other. He’s aware that Phil doesn’t look at him either, both of them patently ignoring each other as if a single glance before they arrived home might be more damning than Orpheus’ folly and break the spell of silent peace surrounding them in a loss of composure right there in the middle of the street, subject to the notice of every wandering eye.

As it is, Dan ducks his head to avoid meeting any curious or idle glances, relying on the shadows of the umbrella and the relative emptiness of lesser known side streets to grant them anonymity. On any other day he was prepared for when people recognized him, turning with a smile and an easy laugh when someone called his name and asked please for a hug. It was harder on days when he didn’t want to be seen, when he felt too poorly or emotionally unprepared to engage in social interaction. Tonight, with his entire biology and mentality rearranged into a creature unfit to be near anything with a pulse he’s never wished harder to be able to recede into the darkness and is momentarily grateful for the sheets of rain gathering around their umbrella, distorting their forms into indistinct silhouettes.  
Between the pull of his thirst and the descent of his senses into a contained delirium, as the looming shape of their home appears in the distance, he’s intent only on the idea of rushing inside and shutting himself within the muffled quietude of their hallways and rooms where he might contentedly indulge the idea of becoming a hermit.

_Home, where the only heartbeat I have to worry about is one and, hopefully, once I drink the rest of what Teague left me, maybe not even that anymore._

The question remained however, of what to do tomorrow when the supply was finished and he’d have to brave another evening excursion outside of the house to buy more, especially when now faced with the nebulous threat of a Night Court of elders he’d never known existed. Whatever paranoia he’d once held for the dark is now magnified tenfold. Even with a newfound acuity to his vision that allowed him to glean the shadows for whatever might be hiding there, a lingering dread creeps its way across his shoulders with the sensation of being watched. After tonight, it will be hard to leave the house and not feel eyes on his back at every turn, eyes belonging to creatures with more maligned intentions than approaching him for an autograph or a picture. It’s a dread that prompts him to glance over his shoulder every few paces to see if the vampire that had attacked Phil might have changed his mind about discretion and had decided to return and finish them off.

He already considered their narrow escape nothing more than a stroke of luck, a cheap blessing that offers an uncomfortable presentiment haunting him with the idea that it had been too easy- the kind of convenient reprieve from disaster that only worked in movies and books, and even then never without another deadlier threat waiting to emerge once the calm of relief was over. It’s a worry he isn’t able to focus on at the moment, not when he can’t shake the image of Phil with his neck strained up and to the side, skin pulled taut for the fangs aimed to pierce through to the vein beneath, held hostage by a figure with an arrogant posturing demeanor, the spitting image of every foppish upper crust vampiric villain he’d ever read about, prepared to drain Phil without hesitation. He can’t remember anything after the point of turning the corner into the alley and watching the scene unfold. The rest of his memory is a blur of white heat, of fomented rage and desperation that had propelled him forward without thinking to stop the act before it could begin.

“Get away from him,” he remembered saying as he’d barreled into the man’s side with a sloppy rugby tackle, “he’s not yours. He’s not yours.”

At the same time an avaricious predatory impulse had shot through his mind, declaring with single-minded possessiveness, “Mine. Not yours. Mine.”

_As if he were a suitcase I was retrieving from baggage claim. Mine? What exactly was that supposed to mean?_

The words had tumbled from his mouth before he was aware of saying them, compelled by a need to protect and defend, but with the fervor of the encounter over and rationality able to subdue the newly formed part of his soul that answered to feral instinct alone, he still isn’t sure what he’d meant to say.

“He’s my friend,” was the easiest answer he could give under duress, but it had felt like saying the ocean was full of water or that space was dark and deep. ‘Friend’ fell short of what he’d meant to impart to a stranger who had only seen Phil as convenient prey. Not that he had been able to think very clearly at the time. The thirst had overrode all reason, quaking with indignation at the idea of being thwarted and subdued at every turn, first, from his interrupted meal in the kitchen and then held in check against using Phil as unwitting blood donor. In hindsight, he’s surprised he’d been capable of speech at all and an unsettling idea occurs to him that whatever urge had viciously claimed Phil as his own had nothing to do with platonic overtures of seeing Phil as a significant other or a friend, but more in the way a lion might covet a zebra it had marked for a meal.

As Phil walks alongside him, without a scratch on him physically to speak for what he’d just endured, Dan is aware he should be glad, relieved that he had the last minute wherewithal to turn animalistic craze into quick fire cunning that didn’t require the brute force of a power he wasn’t sure how to control, but he doesn’t feel glad. At the moment he feels like nothing human.

Although the threat of danger is over and their paths are converged towards the tentative security of their home, every nerve in his body thrums like live wires, attuned with the precision of a predator quietly gauging its surroundings, biding its time to seek out the perfect moment to reveal itself and strike, all just as Teague had described to him, when he'd said, "that’s what we are, mate, proper monsters with a bite," and Dan feels as if it’s a message he’s only beginning to understand.

If he could travel back in time he might have visited his past self and destroyed every vampire themed book and dvd in the flat before he could see it, if only to prevent him from romanticizing an experience that is nothing like what he’d envisioned when he’d first flipped through an Anne Rice novel and been taken with the philosophizing hedonistic figures between the pages. Their lives had seemed lush, powerful and complex by comparison. In those stories the centuries made their personalities indomitable of will and more astute, if not always more human. They certainly hadn’t represented the jumbled mess of emotions and hunger currently making him feel like a teenager wading through puberty all over again, one defined by trying to control a blood thirst rather than a burgeoning libido and voice change.

At least puberty had been a gradual process, albeit at times a frustrating one, not an abrupt transformation that had neatly shattered his preconceptions about the world and himself in the course of a single evening.

_I’d take the cliché glitter and dark romance over this any day. No wonder everyone in Lovecraft’s stories went out of their minds. To go from thinking you have the concept of reality all figured out, to think you know enough about how the natural world operates to suddenly be confronted with evidence to the contrary, something that your mind has no way to define or grasp, that goes beyond the bounds of logic or reason; then to actually become something you thought couldn’t possibly exist in the course of one night and trying to control yourself against drinking an entire city dry-God. I’m sorry that I ever complained about taking the GCSEs. At least I had time to prepare for them, but this-not even a lifetime of experience could help me understand the depth of what’s happening to me right now._

He thinks back to what he’d read years ago about the body replacing its cells every seven years, shedding the dross of the old and replacing it with newly replicated tissue and bone, effectively making another better, more renewed version of himself over time. There was mercy in a slow gradual transformation that gave his body an opportunity to acclimate itself to new streams of blood cells so that at least on a cellular level he would never be a stranger to himself, but now he’s razed to the core of his soul, trying to come to terms with a body electrified to a point of awareness so strong it threatens to drown him under a world colored by the outrageous sounds of life sloshing ripe with blood that he’s free to take at an instant if he chooses.

This is an identity crisis of a magnitude he never imagined dealing with, at least not one defined by an unnatural appetite or facing down a hegemony of vampires or trying to protect the friend at his side who had almost become dinner for one member of said hegemony. In an instant, any worry about controlling the hunger has been compounded by a dozen other dilemmas that will require every bit of resourcefulness and cunning to master, but all he has in mind to do for the rest of the evening is drink his fill of the last rations in the fridge and collapse onto the sofa before having to recount the entirety of his strange and drastic transformation, a task he has about as much interest for as watching paint dry.

_But I owe it to him,_ he thinks, _especially when I drove him right into the middle of this mess by opening my mouth without thinking._

He can’t forget the look on Phil’s face after his explosive outburst in the kitchen, the way it had receded into a weary withdrawn expression far more effective in conveying dismay and frustration at Dan’s words than any punch to the face.

_I would have preferred it. Anything would have been better than the way he looked at me before he left-Like I shattered everything happy and good in his world._

The immediate regret of that realization had wormed past his hunger, dulling it to a low roar overpowered by the compulsion to leave the bloody mess of their kitchen and flee out into the rain after Phil, hesitating for only a moment when he’d opened the front door to a surge of heartbeats pleading for him to have a taste, The invitation had sounded all too inviting, drowning him with lazy contentment at the idea of becoming lost in the anonymous shadows of the evening to do just that, to gorge himself like an old god on offerings of blood before collapsing into a sated delirium, drunk on the borrowed heat of strangers. The urgency of concern however had momentarily quelled his hunger and yanked him from the disturbing daydream before he could indulge it any further. Now, he idly wonders if that subtle mark of humanity, the active choice of caring, might help him navigate the suggestion of eternity or if that too would one day falter to a shadow of empathy until he became just as cold and unhinged as the vampire in the alleyway.

It’s one more disturbing idea to give him pause. If progression was the natural state of all living things, now that he was in effect no longer natural or living, would his mind eventually reject him like foreign tissue, expelling him from sanity and reason to be the bloodthirsty revenant of old stories, to be what every traditional vampire was before they’d become suave bon vivants in romance novels? He’s aware that with any luck or lack of it he has the rest of immortality to find out.

_I’m stuck with this situation and I’ll have to make the best of it until I understand what to do with it, but this is all…beyond me right now. Teague said he lived for four hundred years. How did he make it this far not going completely mad? Everyone is so loud and everyone smells so-Phil smells so-he smells like-_

What was it exactly?

It’s been bothering him the entire walk back. There’s the compelling tinge of blood and something else hiding just underneath. It’s not the spiced attar of his cologne or the brisk sweetness of soap clinging to his skin, not the sharp note of the rain washing those smells away, but something else, something naggingly familiar that lingers with a word at the tip of his tongue. It’s a not-scent, he finally decides, a strange sensation he can only compare to the way some people said December was blue or a number was green, something that wasn’t strictly a smell at all.

_It’s like an emotion, like walking into the middle of an argument and feeling the tension crawl down your back or that cold spot in the middle of your stomach when witnessing someone else’s embarrassment at something they did wrong and you weren’t supposed to see. It’s so weird… It’s like I can smell what he’s feeling-but he’s feeling what?_

With the safety of their doorstep finally reached Dan allows himself a moment to look at Phil, to gauge his expression, but all he can see is a neutral cautious mask giving nothing away. The keys clink and slip across the knuckles of Phil’s hand as he hurriedly tries to fish the correct one from the set to allow them back into their home and Dan notes how fatigue makes deep lines beneath his eyes and around the lax downturn of his mouth. He’s uncharacteristically quiet, with a gravity to his silence that itches at the back of Dan’s teeth as if Phil were the one with a deadly secret and not him. If the silence wasn’t a giveaway for his exhaustion then his washed out complexion is, with a wan hue more severe than his usual pallor. It’s the same way he appeared on mornings when he rose from a rough night’s sleep to a day started bright and early with the sound of home renovations going on behind their walls with a cacophony of hammers and drills set to drive them both mad.

_And yet, after the day he’s just had, anyone else would have run off, but he decided to stay and walk back with me. What does that say for him? And what does it say for me when the last thing I want to do is give an explanation he deserves when it’s an explanation I still don’t understand?_

Phil’s kind and open personality came with a measure of foolhardy trust, an ability that usually found him photographing squirrels from a few inches away even when they stood a chance of scratching his hand or investigating a strange bee by placing his face precariously close to its stinger. It was a quality that allowed him to see the best in people before they had a chance to disappoint him and even now Dan thinks, even after he what he saw, after what I told him, after coming so close to disaster, he’s still coming back home with me.

He has an urge to take Phil by the shoulders and shake him and ask just what are you that you can be so complacent in the face of everything that happened to you? How do you do it? How can you just accept and move on from there, how can you not be in shock after what you just saw? How can you just walk in step with me with such unfailing compassion and not want to keep at least a hundred paces between us?

In his place, Dan wonders how he would react if Phil appeared in their home one day with eyes suddenly darkened to black and his skin a more translucent shade of pale, severe and cold, with a drop of blood staining his mouth flush with red. How would it be if it had been him looking in on Phil in the kitchen, lapping at a hand covered in blood? With their places switched he can’t say if perhaps morbid curiosity and years spent exchanging confidences might have conspired to keep him in place despite the danger or if he might have fled the house completely, too weirded out by the entire situation to give any room for comprehension.

_Phil already knows exactly what’s wrong, the same way he always knows more than he lets on, but he’ll want to hear it from me first before he admits it. He’ll want to know what happened and why and I still don’t have the answers to those questions. It’s like giving a presentation in front of the class all over again and repeating what everyone else has just said with reworded paragraphs that all mean the same thing. We’re both aware this defies explanation so why can’t I just cut to the chase and have him understand that I don’t understand what I am right now? But he wants details and who wouldn’t? Hell, I still want the details._

_God_ , he thinks as Phil drops the keys for the third time, _I don’t want to do this._

The feeling of paranoia itches higher along the nape of his neck and he spares another quick glance behind him. Nothing but the sight of people hurrying home or dashing into cars to seek shelter from the rain confronts him, but still the feeling persists, the same uneasy dread he’d felt when he’d walked into a floral shop after hours and heard the lilting strains of a piano echoing from the conservatory in a danse macabre he’d never forget.

They’re being watched, he’s certain of it or if they aren’t now they will be soon.

Before Phil can stoop to retrieve the keys again, Dan darts past to snatch them up and jostle them into the lock with a deft twist of his hand. He ushers Phil inside and slams the door behind them as he takes to the stairs at breakneck speed. In less time than it takes to blink he’s at their door and when he turns to see if Phil is following after he’s startled to find him staring up wide-eyed, frozen at the bottom of the steps with the umbrella still open and dripping water all over the floor.

“What?”

“You just-I’ve never seen you move that fast. One minute you were right here and now you’re up there.”

Oh, right. In his mind he had only taken the stairs at his usual pace, the way Phil stares up at him however it must have appeared like he flew up the steps like a fleet shadow. He remembers Teague’s warning of how his strength and speed were now augmented to a state surpassing that of a human’s and he thinks it will take some time for him to school his actions in front of other people to prevent them from noticing.

“Sorry…apparently it’s part of the package deal. Or as far I’ve been told anyway.”

Phil gazes back with a blank expression.

“Look, I’ll tell you about it once we’re inside and I’ve had that stuff in the fridge.”

“Blood.” Phil says. His tone is level and matter of fact, as if assuring himself of what had been in the pot on the stove all along.

Dan nods. What else could he say? There was no point in dissimulating any longer. Even if the confrontation in the alley had never taken place Dan is sure the explanation of a tomato based soup recipe would have gone over poorly, not when the smell and the mess in the kitchen attested to a substance that had nothing to do with anything remotely edible to humans.

Phil clears his throat and shakes water from the umbrella before snapping it close. “You do what you have to. I’ll…I’ll wait for you in the lounge after I’ve dried off.”

It’s there again, a quick shared glance of knowing and once more Dan has to resist the urge to confront him and ask how he can do it, how can he not question everything in one go right here instead of making allowances for him to satisfy what they both knew by now was an unnatural thirst?

He’s aware however that starting any conversation or argument out on the stairwell in full earshot of their neighbors would only guarantee more attention that they could deal with, despite their recording sessions which he was sure lead to stranger conversation and eyebrow raising noises to be overheard between their walls. Instead, he opens the door he’d left unlocked in his rush to leave and recedes into the comforting privacy of their flat.

Once inside, the reek of spilled blood wafts up from the kitchen, already drying and curdling on the tiles as he’d left it. He’s sure it’s an acrid bitter odor that Phil can smell, but if he does he doesn’t acknowledge it as he quickly files past Dan into the lounge, shrugging off his jacket as he goes, with a resolute refusal to even glance at the blood stained glass of their kitchen door.

In some cases, Dan thought, maybe ignorance really was bliss.

_Well, get on with it then, before you change your mind and bite into him instead. Just as you want do right now, don’t you? Curious to see what it’s like warm and rich from the source instead of from a Styrofoam container. Because one day you will and the probability of it being him the one you bite over anyone else is significantly higher and who could stop you from doing it, not when the lizard brain part of you wants to try it so badly?_

Dan screws his eyes shut against the rambling suggestions of his subconscious and exhales a shuddering breath through his mouth.

Just make a plan of action. Drink first, clean up the mess next, meet Phil in the lounge later for a conversation you really don’t want to have but must.

The first notch on his agenda is considerably easier than the second. He makes a pointed effort to ignore the gore lining the counters and floor tiles whilst busying himself at the stove to prepare the last container. It’s difficult however not to remember what had transpired only a few hours earlier when he’d first walked in on Phil with the cut on his hand and immediately drifted miles away from rational thought and had instead come all too close to making a grave mistake. The memory only makes the thirst more savage and he’s marginally aware of cleaning another pot and bowl to make the same bain-maire set up from before as his mind replays the night’s events in exhaustive detail. Phil with his hand seeping a thin runnel of red across his fingers, standing in the middle of the kitchen with his back cornered to the sink, in the right position of vulnerability for Dan to have rushed over, grabbed his wrist and bit into the skin to drink.

 _But I never would have bitten him,_ Dan thinks as he reaches into the back of the fridge for the last container, _but I could have, at that moment nothing could have stopped me. It would have been so easy. But I would never, I could never-but I almost did._

And one day you will.

He shakes his head with a frown to focus on the task at hand as he pours the blood into the pot and waits for the mixture to once more come to a simmer. He doesn’t waste time sampling it from his fingers again and instead removes the bowl carefully and sets it down on the counter, hesitating long enough to stare at the dark red swirls steaming warm to the brim of the white ceramic like grisly soup stock.

_This is my life now. Drinking blood from a bowl and hoping it’ll be enough to suffice until the next night. I’m not sure there are enough internet support groups in the world to help make sense of what exactly is happening here._

Just as he had done on the first night, he takes the bowl carefully between his hands, lifts it to his lips and without further hesitation opens his mouth to drink.

The taste is the same as he remembers it, a satisfying draught tracing a path of heat down his throat more potent and heady than liquor. His fangs bloom sharper past his gums, miniature scything curves that click against the side of the bowl as he tilts his head back further for every drop. He can’t remember his first taste of blood being this overwhelming and wonders if maybe it worked a bit like how food became more savory after going the better part of the day starving for something good to eat. Prickled heat races up his arms and constricts his thighs with a sensation similar to when he was desperately aroused with heated pressure building in his stomach and coiling at his groin until he forced the unbidden thoughts away or took care of the urge himself. It’s an erotic, sinuous delirium and he’s lost to it all, his mind blanking out into a profusion of hectic thoughts tinged with red, hips canting slowly back and forth against the counter in a mindless rocking motion as he swallows. A whining moan escapes his mouth and he would be mortified to hear it, to know this time it was blood which had prompted that reaction, but he’s too inundated with the flavour rushing past his mouth and coating his tongue to care.

_Will it be like this every night? Because if it is-if it is I’m not sure I can take it. This is too intense. It’s-ah god. Oh fuck._

Distantly, he’s aware of being half hard and shoves his hips firmly against the side of the counter to take the edge off a sensual thrill that’s turned into a full blown state of arousal, mindful enough to not bring things to such a point that he’d have to race back to his room for a change of jeans later. He keeps the pressure steady, stopping himself against applying any friction that might yield more embarrassment than he already felt at being so wound up over nothing more than sating his thirst. At the same time he hopes beyond hope that Phil, true to his habit for impeccable timing, might not choose this instant to walk in on him again and be treated to a show more disturbing than what he’d first witnessed on seeing Dan lick his fingers clean with the same drowsy languor overtaking him now.

The blood is finished sooner than expected and he’s left clutching the empty bowl, breathless and dazed while trying to steel himself against the small riots of shivers running down his spine like separate aftershocks of pleasure. Past the run on dialogue of his thoughts which tell him, ‘this is sick, this isn’t right, this shouldn’t feel that good,’ he continues to run a finger around the lip of the bowl to chase any remaining dregs left behind with greedy contentment. For an instant, his appetite rages to a peak with an insistence for “ _more. More. MORE._ ” It’s a hysterical yowling desire that slams into his stomach with a force that loosens his grip on the bowl, dropping it with a clatter onto the counter as he shudders with a white knuckled grip on the stove in an effort to keep himself from seeking Phil out in the lounge to satisfy those demands.

_Just ride it out. Just wait like Teague said to do until my body adjusts to being full._

He tries for calm but the yearning bows his spine, doubling him over with cold shivers that wrack his body head to toe. The toaster offers a warped reflection of his face when he looks up, open mouthed and panting to reveal his fangs long and flush against his bottom lip. Even to himself he looks dangerous and wild and this time he isn’t shocked to see the whites of his eyes are completely drowned out to black.

Like a ghoul, he thinks, and really is there a difference?

It’s like looking back at a stranger, a more savage, restless version of himself, but despite his shock he’s also fascinated. It’s the first time he’s been able to properly see the extent of what he’d become and he can’t help staring. Slowly, he tilts his head one way and then the other for a better angled view and as he moves, a few specks of light, reflected from the bulb overhead, refract off the surface of his eyes like small stars, as if he had a portion of deep space spilling out of his skull replete with clusters of dwarfed galaxies.

 _No, more like black holes._  
He recalls what Phil had said in the alley and a sinking dismay wells up in his chest to replace the pleasant afterglow of his hunger.

Unnatural, his mind suggests, insidious and strange.

But at the same time he finds himself unable to help an electric thrill at the thought of suddenly transcending everything he’d once thought possible. Untapped power tingles at his fingertips. He can feel it along his bones and through the cordoned tendons of his arms as the blood moves through his body. He’d only tested the bare minimum of what he could do when he’d unwittingly thwarted Lenny and his cohorts in the alleyway on his first night and used his endurance to survive a crushing blow from a vampire much older and more experienced than him. The world with it all its physical limitation suddenly can’t hold him back anymore and the realization leaves him with a daunting sense of responsibility in the face of new untold freedoms.

 _It’s pretty cool, all things considered_ , he thinks as he inclines his head and bares his teeth at his reflection to see the full effect of his fangs. 

_On second thought, it’s also a bit disturbing._

There’s something primal about his bared grin, the same way he once felt when he donned plastic vampire fangs for a costume and for a moment in time pretended that he owned the shadows of the evening. Only this time the reality is far less what he imagined it to be. The power he has is reckless and the blood burning its way through his veins brings him to a point of boiling desperation caught somewhere between the pleasure of orgasm and the destructive peak of spontaneous combustion. The implications of being simply human had been difficult enough to handle. Coming to terms with accepting his limited lifespan and filling it with enough aspirations and accomplishments as he could manage before his time was up had been a conclusion easier to arrive at. Life was about living and filling the fleeting days with meaning, but what did death mean when, as the vampire in the alleyway had told him, he was now death with a human face? Confronted with a body that was no longer finite, to know that he had all the time in the world until the world’s own inevitable cold destruction, he’s left with the disquieting idea of how to make sense of it all, of how to find a place in a universe not engineered for stasis or mythical monsters, of how to control and manage a body transformed into a vehicle of destruction that could extinguish the warm fragility of the people around him in an instant of deadly oversight.

He had been close to doing just that when Phil had reached out to pull him into an unexpected embrace that pressed his mouth flush against Phil’s jawline until he could feel each separate heartbeat echo through his skin. It would have been an easy thing to turn his head just so, mouth along Phil’s throat and lower his fangs to the vein pulsing warm and strong there. Even as he thinks about it, Dan’s mouth waters again and he finds himself not as disturbed as he should be by the idea of it all, of biting someone instead of lapping lukewarm drops from a bowl. The morbid curiosity is too strong and one day he’s certain he will try it, just to see, just to know.

_No, I won’t. And never Phil. Never him._

The face he sees staring back at him, warped further into a monstrous visage by the chromed surface of the toaster, assures him however that he will.

His appetite finally diminished to a low waning grumble and his senses no longer colluding to overwhelm him, he takes a deep breath and tears himself away from the troubling questions posed by his reflection, determined not to indulge whatever existential meltdown might be waiting in the wings to overtake him, at least not before he had a chance to speak with Phil. Instead he focuses on the kitchen, still mired in clotted streaks of blood, and the thought of the impending task before him instantly obliterates any lingering erotic sensations or reflective introspections.

The sight is bad enough but the smell is worse. It’s a briny soured odor that reminds him of a milkshake he’d left sitting in a glass in his room for days before the reek of it alerted him to its presence behind a stack of books. He never considered himself a complete slob when it came to tidying things, but he wasn’t particularly fond of dedicating any more time to it than necessary, usually content to let Phil clear away dishes he’d left in the sink or wipe down the stove after they were done cooking a meal. Faced with the magnitude of the cleanup ahead of him he’s able to sympathize somewhat with Phil’s frustration when forced to take out the garbage or clean the kitchen when it wasn’t his turn.

_There’s no way I could negotiate with him to help clean up this mess. Just have to bite the bullet and do it myself and hope I don’t miss a spot that prompts the landlord to call in a forensics unit to figure out why we have a blood stain on the side of the fridge._

He uses the paper towels at first, wetting them with water and a little dish soap, but before long he reduces the entire roll to pink and red sodden crumples of paper in the trash bin without putting much of a dent in the stains on the floor.

_You know, I don’t remember there being any domestic kitchen montages in vampire films. They were usually more occupied with hunting victims, lounging on antique chaises and looking stoically evil. Never thought I’d be undead and still reaching for the Lysol. Youtube probably doesn’t have how to videos on cleaning up crime scenes. Unless Zoe has a secret side channel I don’t know about._

He grabs another roll and lays down a thin layer of the Lysol spray mixed with soap and water on the tiles to quickly soak through and prevent the mess from setting any more than it already has. He’s not sure how long he stays in the kitchen, wiping down each surface in tireless circles like a more deranged lady Macbeth, his nose red and stinging from the smell of concentrated bleach in the air, but when he finally looks up again to see if he’d missed a spot, the kitchen is pristine and brilliantly white as if he’d never spilled a drop in the first place.

_That should take care of any kitchen responsibilities I have for at least a month. Hell, a year. Which only leaves…Phil._

Sorting out his hunger and cleaning the kitchen had been difficult enough to manage, but faced with how to go about the impending conversation ahead of him proves to be more daunting than he’d expected. This wasn’t about preparing a week in advance for a talk at a panel or researching topics in order to have a more broadened perspective on an issue before he spoke about it, this was something far out of his depth, one in which he floundered for comprehension just the same as Phil.

He takes enough time to hurriedly clean off his face at the tap and dab away the dried flakes of blood on his arms so that at least on the surface he wouldn’t appear to be so much the revenant he felt like. Once done, he checks his reflection again and is somewhat relieved to see that although his eyes are still dilated and huge they’re no longer dense pits of black holes in his face and his fangs have receded to smaller points within his mouth. He gives a few halfhearted tousles of his hair but quickly gives up, past the point of fussing over a fringe which has completely devolved past anything he might describe as hobbit hair. He’s too tired and eager to get the conversation ahead of him over with, to see if when all was said and done, if Phil might elect to stay or leave the house entirely once he understood just the kind of threat Dan now posed. Not just to his life but to their entire livelihood.

He was no longer able to travel outside during the day to so much as retrieve their mail without the threat of immolation. The radio show was now in question along with normal day to day travel and any potential opportunities to host events. Whatever wanderlust he might have otherwise entertained to explore the world as he wished to would now have to be scheduled around his nocturnal biology- of course, that was if he ever had the chance to make it far enough to worry about travel when he apparently had a court of elder vampires on his heels. One thing at a time, he thinks with a deep breath as he leaves the seclusion of the kitchen and heads out into the hall to confront the task he’d been dreading since he’d woken up.  
He stops in his tracks when he notices the plant on the radiator, a little unassuming souvenir from the florist’s reminding him of his fateful encounter with Yilmaz. For a second he almost stalks over to snatch it up with the intention of stuffing it in the bin, but restrains himself at the last second.

_It’s just a plant after all. Not its fault I blundered my way into being a vampire, although as far as bringing luck I’d say it’s not exactly living up to potential._

He thinks over the past few days and wishes he could rewind things back to the point in time before Phil had left on his family holiday, when he’d filled the kitchen with the smell of waffles and coffee and the sound of a Muse song hummed under his breath, the both of them happy and blissfully unaware of the danger to come.  
Wonder if we’ll ever make it back to that point again, he wonders. Or if I’m just fooling myself with the hope that somehow we’ll figure this out.

The storm continues to thunder outside and as he stops by the door of the lounge to peer in he notices the windows are dark with paths of rain and foggy condensation, throwing the room into a bleak relief of shadows that the half lit bulbs on the chandelier overhead doesn’t help to illuminate. Phil is sat on the couch surrounded by cushions in a small makeshift nest, his gaze focused on the TV with a blank expression on his face that suggests whatever he’s thinking about has nothing to do with the advert playing across the screen.

“Hey.” Dan announces his presence softly to prevent from catching Phil off guard, but Phil turns with a small jump all the same and watches as he steps into the room.

An awkward pause ensues for a few moments in which the only sound between them is that of the falling rain outside and the newscaster’s voice on the television. Dan shuffles in place and Phil continues to stare with an owlish unblinking regard, his back straight and stiff against the back of the sofa. The atmosphere is too strange and tense. He knows Phil must feel it too, the way they’re skirting the issue at hand as if they were strangers meeting for the first time and not best friends who had spent the better part of five years in each other’s company.

_But really I suppose it’s the same. It’s not like this is a side of me he’s ever seen before. Or that I’ve ever seen either for that matter. We might as well be strangers now in a way. Just how does one broach the subject of being a vampire? ‘Oh hey, how are you, how was the trip up North and by the way, sorry about not texting you back, I’ve suddenly developed fangs and a new liquid diet and it’s taken more willpower than I thought possible to not include you as an appetizer and I may or may not have reached eighth base with the kitchen counter while trying to subdue this thirst?’ I thought the worst thing we’d ever have to face was how to manage our careers as an enjoyable, sustainable investment we wouldn’t regret years down the line. Not discussing how to navigate our way around my being a vampire or Phil suddenly being a meal option instead of just a roommate and a friend._

“Right. So…” Lost for how to begin Dan looks away and nods towards the fireplace. “I’ll just light the fire. It’s like a freezer in here.”

Phil doesn’t answer but Dan can feel his gaze resting along his back the entire time as he paces over to the grate, fully aware that as far as icebreakers went lighting the fireplace wasn’t exactly the best ploy. There’s the small hiss and whomph of gas before blue flames appear with a flash of light and a comforting circle of warmth that he hopes at the very least will dispel the chill in the air and help to give them both a bit more courage to speak.

Silence continues to dog his footsteps as he steps away from the fireplace and only after he settles into his side of the couch, does Phil finally take a breath to ask, “are you alright?”

From anyone else Dan would have taken the question as a casual nicety, a rhetorical question that didn’t require a straight answer, but Phil stares at him with genuine concern and he takes a moment to look away from the heat of that empathetic scrutiny before replying.

“Relatively, I guess. Now anyway. And you? I’d thought you’d be halfway to the police or anywhere away from this house and me by now.”

“I won’t say it didn’t occur to me, but like you said before who would believe me? I’m not sure I would believe me.” Phil stops short and points. “Your eyes are still so dark and huge, like this cat I saw in a video once after it had catnip.”

Dan lets out an involuntary snort of laughter. “Well, I’m not high on catnip if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t know what I mean. I don’t even know what’s going on.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Dan-”

Yes. You do.” Dan reaches over for the remote to lower the volume on the TV. “You do know, but you want me to spell it out for you and I don’t know how. So you have to meet me halfway with this. It took me a while for me to just accept what happened. I’m not asking for you to accept it, but it would help if you tried. For me, I mean.”

“I’m trying, but it’s all a bit much. That dream I had on the train, that man and then you-It’s like understanding seahorses are real all over again, but this is completely different.”

“Er-right. Nothing to do with seahorses at all. More like a lamprey I guess. No, no actually that’s- Dan shakes his head, “that’s really not better at all come to think of it.”

Phil stares blankly.

“Getting on with it then.” He takes a deep breath. “You know that old quote by Shakespeare right? The one where Hamlet says, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy? Well, turns out he was right. No metaphorical conjecturing needed. A few nights ago we could have had this conversation and I’d tell you I didn’t believe in ghosts or any other supernatural creatures outside of me scaring myself senseless in the dark, but then I met one and became one and I really can’t say with certainty anymore what might or might not exist. Not when what I am right now shouldn’t exist at all.”

“You became one…” Phil trails off with a lilt to the end of his sentence meant for Dan to fill in the blank.

“No, we’re not reenacting that scene from Twilight. I don’t have to say it and I’m not asking you to tell me when you already know.”

“Dan, this is…impossible.”

“You don’t think I know that?” Dan laughs. “This whole night, this whole experience should never have happened-I mean how do people go their whole lives not knowing about a group of vampires living right under their noses, not with snapchats and camera phones and social media where the slightest sneeze from a celebrity goes viral in a second. Where’s the Edward Snowden of parapsychological information leaks? You’d think we’d know more about all this by now. It’s impossible, but it is and I am one.”

“You were still you when I left. I mean, you still are, obviously, but-vampires, Dan. That’s pushing the envelope a bit far. I know what happened tonight was real, but I still don’t understand how.”

There’s a plea for comprehension etched in the stillness of Phil’s form, a sincere urge to listen to him speak and Dan closes his eyes as he recalls the night he’d wandered into a florist’s and had his life changed forever.

He begins slowly, recounting his detoured excursion into the shop and soon his voice finds a rhythm in the conversation and the words pour from him in more detail than he thought he would remember; everything from the unearthly mien of the shopkeeper who had been a vampire all along to the vibrant red of the hibiscus petals and how it had been the last thing he’d seen before succumbing to fatigue and blood loss. Phil’s eyes slowly widen as he describes waking up the next day with a new allergy to sunlight and a ravenous appetite for blood. He talks about walking home and encountering the drunken group of revelers he had nearly attacked after they’d surrounded him and Phil’s eyes go wider when he describes nearly biting a fox out of desperation in his hunger. He goes on to reveal his encounter with Teague, the vampire whose appearance was much younger than the four hundred years of existence he purported to have and finally leaves off with his arrival back home, exhausted after two nights that had reassembled his identity into something else entirely.

It’s the longest speech he’s given since Phil’s returned home and when he’s done he slumps in exhaustion, glad to finally have the entire story off his chest. The relief he feels at having it all out in the open at last makes him believe there was a kind of danger in shouldering certain secrets alone, a burden that was better shared when exchanged with a person one trusted above all else, but behind his relief is the dread of vulnerability, a wavering fear in the middle of his chest, cold and heavy as he waits for Phil’s reaction, unsure of what it might be. But this is Phil he reminds himself and where with anyone else he might not have dared to speak at all Phil had always been the one sure port in any storm, a steadfast presence he’d never felt uncomfortable to be around. Past his attempts at self-reassurance, he’s aware suddenly that he isn’t afraid of what Phil might say, but that ultimately he might leave, abandoning Dan to his new transformation, alone with nothing but his hunger and the frenzy to be something else, a cunning bestial urge only held in check by the thinnest thread of willpower.

_And because for a moment in the kitchen he looked at me and he was afraid. The way he never looked at me before. And I never want to see it again._

Even with the story out and done he’s afraid the same fearful look will become a permanent expression on Phil’s face, a stamp of rejection that would ultimately see them going their separate ways. It’s enough suddenly that he wishes he could try to seize Phil’s mind again and erase this moment from his mind, to make him forget the entire night had ever happened at all, in a greedy bid to hold onto the one good thing, the only sure thing, he still has in a world that has suddenly become alien and dangerous.  
But he isn’t confident he can recreate the moment in the alley, when, in a pique of desperation, he had tugged at a tenuous thread of connection between them in which he’d been able to redirect Phil’s actions as if he were controlling a marionette.

_Exactly like Teague said I might be able to do- that glamour, voodoo mind trick thing-whatever it’s called._

He’d felt a bit sickened at the ability as well, horrified at the way Phil had lapsed into a drowsy complacent expression, eyes flat and devoid of his affable personality, like a doll with Phil’s figure and face but nothing of his warmth or soul. Even if he lived long enough to enjoy a portion of eternity Dan wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to the idea of using people like pawns on a chessboard. It was enough that he was a creature that saw humans as its primary food source, he didn’t need to play the imp on their shoulder as well, coercing them to do things at his will, no matter how much he thought the ability might be a useful trick to pull at gatherings when trying to find an easy exit out of an awkward conversation.

The lounge segues back into the quiet of the rain pattering against the windows and Phil continues to stare at him for a time, soaking in the information with an intense tight lipped silence until Dan wonders if Phil had perhaps lost all ability to speak.  
Then finally, after another long, tense moment, he blinks, leans back against the armrest and asks, “Can your face do the crinkly thing?”

Dan gapes.

“You what?”

“You know, the-“ Phil wrinkles his nose and presses his eyebrows together to create vertical creases on his forehead and Dan can only look on in wide eyed perplexity.

“What the hell are you on about?”

“You know, like in Buffy, when Spike and the other vampires are ready to fight, their faces crinkle up.” Phil continues to hold his eyebrows together as if Dan needed further demonstration of what he meant.

“I just told you all that and you want to know if my face can do the crinkly-this isn’t a 90’s comedy drama about slayers, Phil!”

“Well I don’t know!” Phil’s hands flop to his sides in exasperation. “What am I supposed to say when suddenly vampires exist and one nearly bit me-”

Two nearly bit you, Dan thinks but says nothing as Phil continues.

“And you’re one too. So I don’t know what they do-you do. That’s the only point of reference I have to work off of. I’m trying to meet you halfway like you asked, but this is difficult.”

“I know, I know. And no, there is no crinkly face thing.” As he says it Dan is certain he sees a note of disappointment cross Phil’s face.

“So what about bats?”

“What about them?”

“Do you-turn into one?”

“Even with everything that’s happened to me so far I don’t think transforming into a different species altogether is something I can do.”

“What about crosses? Coffins? Stakes to the heart?”

“Wait, wait,” Dan holds up a hand to slow the onslaught of questions. “Christ, give me a second. Look, your guess is as good as mine for how any of this works. No one handed me a manual after everything was said and done, but I can’t imagine coffins and crosses have any effect on me at all and if stakes are lethal I’m not sure I want to find out. If anything, the only thing I’m sure of about all this is that more has changed on a biological level. Teague said the blood would heal wounds faster.” He points at his forehead, clear of even the slightest pale shadow of a scar from where he’d been thrown into the wall. “And whatever my heartbeat is doing it’s not beating as it normally should. There’s hardly a pulse at all. I can hear yours though. I can smell it too. Your blood I mean, but it’s not as strong now as it was before.”

“Before you fed.”

Dan nods, still taken aback by how calmly accepting Phil appeared to be about the entire situation.

“The blood…” Phil begins warily, “where does it come from?”

Dan hesitates, aware that his next revelation might disturb the latent animal enthusiast inside Phil despite his love for Texas barbecue pizza.

“It’s from the butcher’s. Pig apparently.”

“You’re…drinking blood from a pig?”

“Better than being prime minister and fucking it,” Dan mutters in a low aside.

Phil slips back into a pensive silence and draws his knee up onto the couch, one arm curving around to hug it to his chest, the other relaxing on the armrest to brace himself in an unconscious pose of relaxed grace. It gives Dan a measure of relief to see him becoming more comfortable as they talk, either because he was willfully pushing the threat of danger out of his mind or because he was merely trying to wrangle his confusion into a semblance of order as he gathered Dan’s words, parsing them for details to make sense of this disturbing, extraordinary night.

Dan takes the opportunity to distract himself with a brief aside in wondering how strange it was, the way Phil could lapse into the very portrait of sinuous calm despite his bouts with clumsiness, limbs arranged in a languid manner that was unknowingly elegant and vaguely feline. A twinge of self-conscious envy roils in Dan’s chest as he sits there, mindful of his rumpled clothing from the evening before and his hair a matted coiled mess around his face. He glances sidelong at the thin reflection of himself in the fogged over windows and sees a tall bedraggled spectre with a pronounced slouch and nothing to speak of for elegance or grace.

_I thought being a vampire came implicit with the debonair good looks and porcelain perfect skin, but I look like a potato. An unkempt potato with fangs._

Without thinking he crosses his arms low below his chest and straightens his posture, sucking in his stomach and lifting his chin in a small defiant pose against critical scrutiny. He’s aware the act itself is silly, the only eyes in the room to worry about were Phil’s and his gaze is miles away from thinking about their appearances. With a sigh, Dan relaxes his spine back into a lax unhealthy curve as he waits to see what Phil might say once he made up his mind about the entire situation.

Phil finally tilts his head and asks, “are you sure there’s no crinkly face thing and you just don’t know it yet?”

Dan closes his eyes and covers his face with both hands in weary exasperation.  
“This isn’t going to work.”

“I didn’t mean-”

“I know what you meant. We’re both out of our depth and really what else is there to do but poke fun at it?”

“I wasn’t poking fun. None of this is funny, the way you were in the kitchen, when I came home-I was scared, alright? I’ve never seen you like that before.” Phil’s voice is quiet and Dan uncovers his face to look at him, another rill of dread seeping a chill between his shoulder blades at this admission despite the heat spreading out from the fireplace.

“Was. And aren’t you still scared now?”

“I don’t know. Not exactly. Before I was afraid of the way you looked at me, like you didn’t recognize me at all. Now that we’re sitting here calmly talking this over, I think I’m more afraid of the implications. It’s mental, Dan. This whole situation. But…I’m not afraid of you.”

Dan lets out a breath and slumps further into a boneless puddle against the sofa cushions, not caring at all how he looked. “You know, somewhere on a page in the internet, there are at least a good thousand or so fanfictions with us written into every conceivable scenario and AU and this just feels like one more weird plot in someone else’s story for us that I’d rather read than live. Maybe not even read. Maybe rewrite it myself and get rid of all the extraneous conflict to a point where I can just be a vampire and enjoy myself instead of feeling like I’m about to tear myself apart from the inside out.”

“Well, at least I’m alive in this one.”

“That was almost debatable for a second back there.”

“True.” Phil looks away towards the crackling light in the fireplace and he smiles as he shakes his head. “He was going to bite me. I mean, actually going to bite me.”

“As one does when a vampire.”

“Just like you were about to.”

Dan stops in mid-reply and stares.

“In the kitchen and then before when I woke you up, you had that same look on your face as he did, this wondering expression like you were in a trance or something. And now I know I wasn’t seeing things when your eyes turned black. Just like in the dream.”

“You mentioned that before. That you were going to tell me about it later.”

“Er-It’s nothing. I fell asleep on the train ride back and had this dream which was more of a nightmare if I’m honest and I don’t much want to remember it now, if it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter anymore, not when all this is so much stranger and inexplicable by comparison. I still can’t believe this all came about because you wanted to buy a plant.”

“I suppose that’s what I get for wanting to contribute to your bloody obsession. See, this is why I like staying in all the time. Sleep until the late afternoon, order out for a pizza, get groceries delivered to the house, play Guild Wars until I collapse in front of the screen and no having to run into an ancient vampire who decides you’re interesting enough to become one of them.”

He feels slightly hysterical again as he says it and before long he’s lost to his thoughts again, mulling over how exactly he meant to reconcile the danger he now posed to himself and to Phil.

_This is also why I like fictional universes better. The lay of the land is all set up with neat and concise rules for how everything and everyone works and I can just follow along in someone else’s footsteps, immersing myself in the narrative safely from a distance. Even with video games where I’m in control I at least have respawn points and co-op play to help me along so I don’t fuck up too spectacularly. Now it’s literally do or die where I have no idea what the hell I’m doing or what to expect and I have to worry about a Night Court that knows I defied a set of laws I never knew existed. Just what kind of a name is the Night Court anyway?_

Every time he hears the phrase he can’t help envisioning a House of Commons populated by ancient vampires, all of them staring back at him in a crowd of cold black eyes and leering fangs. The image sends a shudder down his spine and he’s so immersed in the small fear of having to face them alone that he doesn’t hear Phil repeatedly call his name until his name resounds through the room in a loud echo.

He jumps and turns with an abrupt jolt that makes Phil startle backwards in surprise. “Sorry, I just-I wanted to ask, can I see? You know…” Phil shows his teeth and points. “Your fangs.”

“You want to-” Dan blinks as Phil looks back at him with a pleading curious expression. “Yeah, you know what, why not? Just don’t-”

But before he can finish the sentence Phil leans over in a rush to become a looming presence, up close and personal, obliterating any definition of personal space with a hand around Dan’s chin and tilting it up for a better view at the fangs in his mouth.

Dan concedes to the enthusiasm with a roll of his eyes thinking he preferred this reaction better than tense silence and fear.

“Just be careful. Don’t-” Just as he’s about to say the words, ‘don’t poke them,’ Phil decides the best course of investigation is to do exactly that, his eyes wide as he takes in the new set of lengthened incisors with a look of wondering awe.

Dan tries focusing on anything else other than accidentally chomping down on Phil’s finger as it pokes along his gum line, but with his luck thus far he’s not entirely sure he’ll be able to help it if Phil continues to minutely tap his teeth as if prospecting for gold.

“Uh…ill, oo aan ahp ow.”

“Huh?” Phil remains focused on the fangs, too intrigued to make any sense of what Dan is trying to say, his finger prodding one fang and then the other with a dangerous disregard for the needle sharp points. He’s so close Dan can feel each separate exhalation of Phil’s breath tickle his upper lip and the finger pressed against his right fang is a collective spot of heat and a scent of blood that’s precariously close to driving him mad. It’s enough that he can feel the surging thrum of Phil’s pulse coursing up past his gums and into his head as if his fangs were acting like twin tuning forks, redirecting each vibration of Phil’s beating heart into a deep seated itch that nags at him with the need to bite down and seize it between his teeth to taste. If Phil continues like this it won’t be long before he ends up with another cut to match the already injured finger of his other hand.  
Or something more dire than a cut, Dan thinks as the thirst begins to stir again with a sudden interest in the warm source of life pressed invitingly close against his fangs.

"That’s what we are, mate, proper monsters with a bite. Sooner or later you’re gonna bite something human and squirmy, give it a few, you’ll get there. Teague’s words come back to mind with new relevance and Dan is sure now that if he doesn’t put a stop to this he might just fulfill Teague’s warning sooner than he’d thought.

“Ooo an op ow.” 

“Hm?” Phil continues to peer at his fangs and the finger there presses down harder, testing for give, making the pulse echoing through his skin into Dan’s head ratchet up into a painful ache. The compulsion to bite tickles at his jaw and he’s sure if he could see his reflection his eyes would be dilating to black. He needs to stop this, but the morbid curiosity returns, urging him that just a nip at Phil’s finger couldn’t possibly hurt, a little scratch, nothing more than a pinprick of pain, just to compare the taste of blood from a butcher’s shop to that of one springing warm and strong from a living vein. Phil meanwhile is innocently unaware of the danger, deaf to all else but his fascination and it’s that silent declaration of trust that stops Dan from giving in to his clamoring instinct.

“ill. oo an op ow.”

Phil doesn’t hear and only leans in closer, utterly distracted.

“EYE EAD, OO AAN-”

 _For fuck’s sake_ , Dan thinks and yanks away from Phil’s grasp to speak properly.

“I said, you can stop now. The last thing we need is me biting down and developing a taste for you.” He pauses and runs the last sentence through his head. “That- is actually a thing I’ve just said.”

“That’s incredible,” Phil says as he collects himself and, with some reluctance, recedes back onto his side of the couch. “They’re a bit small though. I mean compared to what you see in movies.”

Dan runs his tongue across his fangs to clear them of the residual taste of Phil’s skin, trying to wrestle his composure back under control and not grab Phil by the lapels of his collar and drag him over for a proper taste at his throat.

“They may be small now, but when I’m hungry it gets bigger.”

“Oh, really? That’s different.” Phil says with his tongue caught to one side of his mouth in a cheeky grin until Dan catches on to the unintentional innuendo.

“This conversation…” Dan says wearily as Phil laughs, “I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation to begin with.”

“Well, it’s not like you could avoid it forever. You’d have made enough of those ‘soups’ every night for me to move out until you told me what it really was. The smell is terrible. I think it’s worse than the odor of melted cheese.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“No, I said it’s worse. I’m probably going to have to burn through an entire collection of scented candles every time you eat now.”

“Oh god, maybe not an entire collection. I don’t know if I can take that kind of barrage of smells all at once.”

“Is it really that intense?”

“Right now? No. A little. Colours and sounds are…brighter? More vivid? I don’t know how to describe it. But back there, before we arrived home, it was all just unbelievable, like seeing the world in IMAX 3D. Not in a good way. It’s like those people who have hyperosmia-” Phil furrows his brow and Dan quickly searches for a better way to explain the term. “Er-it’s when someone has a more acute sense of smell than is otherwise normal. Like that book Perfume where the main character could experience smells in a way no one else could? But imagine that with every sense heightened beyond normal human reception. Sight, sound, smell, hearing, touch-all at the same time. I mean if that book was a cautionary tale, then I’m really not looking forward to the probability of years spent trying not to go out of my mind with the intensity of it all.”

“Maybe you need to get used to it. Like when I get new glasses and it takes a bit for me to adjust to the lenses.”

“Phil, this isn’t exactly about getting new prescription strength eyewear.” Dan shakes his head. “I still can’t believe we’re casually discussing this like this is normal. Like an everyday conversation.”

“What else are we supposed to do? I think we’re past the point of screaming like Fay Wray.”

“Are we? Because internally I’m still at that point. I don’t understand how you can be so calm about all this. How can you just take all this in without-I don’t know- having a small breakdown or grabbing every garlic clove in the fridge to throw at me?”

“Do you think that would work?”

“Probably not. I mean it worked well enough in Lost Boys, but they had cool leather jackets and motorcycle rides across Santa Carla and I get an existential crisis and the threat of being stalked by an ancient regime of vampires on just my second night, so if that’s anything to go by, then it’s nothing like what we think it is.”

“True. And I didn’t have to invite you in either when we came home.”

“Except for the small detail that I live here too.”

“But still. Who knows what else you can or can’t do?”

“Teague laid out the basic groundwork of my abilities before he scarpered off like I was suddenly afflicted with the plague and you still haven’t answered my question. How are you able to just ask me about all this with that kind of complete acceptance? How are you able to do that?”

Phil frowns at him. “Do what?”

“You.” Dan brusquely gestures at the air around Phil. “To just be you at all times no matter what’s happening. Things are as they are for you. Like the way you listen to music. It isn’t just the lyrics or the artist or how popular it is, first it’s the sound and how it makes you feel and if you like anything in the moment you continue to like it even if I suggest it’s rubbish or even if a thousand other people tell you why or how they don’t like it and why you shouldn’t either-you just go on with it. I’m not saying it’s bad at all, but it’s so simple for you.”

“I’m just stubborn that way I suppose.” Phil shrugs his shoulders and Dan resists another urge to shake him soundly.

“It’s not only that. It’s hard to be so bloody optimistic all the time, the way you are all the time. You never overanalyze or agonize over much or at least I’ve never seen it.”

“I worry about plenty. You know that.”

Dan makes a face and shakes his head. “No, it’s different. Everyone worries about something, not everyone delves in with that kind of quiet determination anyway. Not like you do. You started an entire channel on your own. You already had a small army of followers when I first found your videos and it was only after a push from you that I ever seriously decided to start mine. You settle on an idea and you try to make it happen without wondering if it’ll be okay or if it’s something you should do. Case in point, this entire situation. You’re here even when everything that happened tonight should have ended with you getting as far away from me as possible.”

“I don’t know really. It’s a little like that Edie Brickell song, where I’m not too aware of everything, but I get along however I can, until I understand something or even when I’m sure I’ll never understand. I like that you want to scour every detail of a situation, even when I think you might be overanalyzing something to death. You always have a different perspective, something more to add, but if I decide I like something then I simply like it, without having to complicate it more than it needs to be. That doesn’t mean I’m always one hundred percent sure about myself or everything else.” 

Phil pauses and considers Dan for a moment before continuing. “But I’ve always been sure about you, even now, even after all this. That hasn’t changed and maybe I’m just being stubborn again, but it was bad back there and we made it through okay. That has to count for something.”

“No.”

A look of confusion crosses Phil’s face. “No?”

“No, you can’t say that. I feel so…uprooted. Like someone just reached into my brain and scrambled all the signals. I’m still me, but on an intrinsic level I’m not. It’s fucking surreal and amazing and absolutely mad. So how can you be sure of me, how can you say that when we have no clue how this is going to work? Do you know what this is, to understand what I am exists when it shouldn’t? And on that note, if I allow for the existence of one thing then I have to allow for the existence of everything else, don’t I? Fairies, dragons, werewolves, ghosts, God.” Dan’s heart drops as he says it. “Oh god, what about god? Heaven, Hell and angels-the whole thing.”

“Dan.” 

“Even if I didn’t take that into consideration, the reality of all this is I’m suddenly the apex predator in the food chain. I can take whoever I want, whenever I want to and if I’m careful enough about it no one would have a clue. I’m every monster in a horror film, with no rules or inhibitions and no one to stop me. Yilmaz herself told me that she chose me simply because she wanted to see what would happen, because somehow I was the most interesting choice of human to turn. No grand scheme or purpose, just because I was interesting, simple as that.”

“Dan.”

“On the surface I’ve always suspected that there was always something arbitrary about the concept of fate, you know, about the universe as a whole. That in the end there is no divine plan or purpose. Nothing matters and because of that I used to think everything matters, every second we spend and every word we say matters, because it’s all we have in the end, so we have to make it count. But to be what I am now, to see things from the perspective of a creature that just wants to drink its fill and roam the night to feed…”

“Dan, calm down.”

“Calm down?” Dan darts up from the couch in a frenzy of desperation. “How can I keep up with all of this-with you-when I can measure out your life in literal beats per minute? You want me to be reasonable, to be calm, I’ve never been more out of sorts with myself than I am right now in this moment. This defies everything. Do you know what this is? It’s one thing to question and redefine your identity when you suddenly have the scrutiny of millions of strangers to grapple with, but this isn’t about public relations or how I relate to our profession-I already came to terms with that ages ago. I’m comfortable with our lives now, but I’m not comfortable with this. This is so much more and it’s horrific, Phil. I look at you now and I feel miserable.”

“…Oh.”

Dan stops in the middle of his ranting pacing circuit in front of the windows to think over what he’d just said as he notes the small crestfallen look on Phil’s face before it once more becomes an expressionless mask.

“No, no. I didn’t mean-God, not like that. It’s the kind of misery when you-”

_When I what? Want him in ways that I don’t understand now is hunger or affection? And at the end of the day, aren’t the two still the same ravenous breakdown of every emotional circuit in my body until I’m satisfied? How am I supposed to differentiate when everything is all muddled up in blood lust and instinct? If I was on my own it wouldn’t be this difficult, because then I wouldn’t have to care. But I’m not alone. You’re here with me and that changes everything. It always has. To that end, you’re dangerous in ways you will never know and I will never understand. You short circuit my best attempts at comprehension and it’s as concerning as you are charming and I could never tell you that in a way that wouldn’t leave me wanting to pace the room ragged after you left, wondering why I had the nerve to say anything at all or why I couldn’t have said something better. You do this to me on a daily basis and before it was nervous energy, wanting to try and test this thing between us, afraid that somehow, somewhere down the line it might not work, that you might leave, but now it’s worse because it’s no longer just about wanting to be your friend. It’s about trying not to kill you or get you killed and I’m afraid I might have already failed without even trying. Yet, with all that, knowing what I am and what could happen to you, you still look at me with that same intensity that says I’m the most important part of your life. How am I supposed to live up to that?_

“Dan.” Phil’s voice breaks through the roar of his internal conflict and it’s only then he realizes he’d frozen in silence. The rain drums harder against the windows behind him with a percussive madness to match the state of his thoughts and he forces himself to speak, to give some order to the jumble of incoherent worry clawing at his mind if only to tear himself away from the tangent of a one sided soliloquy he doesn’t want to entertain further.

“You don’t make me miserable, not like that, it’s just- all this has suddenly made me confront things I’m not sure I was ready to confront. I know in the grand scheme of things the universe could give a shit about me trying to examine my life through an ontological filter, not when so much more of critical worth is happening in the world right at this moment, but I‘m trying to understand, alright? I need to. You know the way we met- it was never luck or fate, but coincidence. So many things could have happened for us to never meet at all, but we did and we moved in together and suddenly we’re here years later and I thought that was all I had to think about. Just the time we’ve spent, our journey together up to this point; but suddenly, one night later, everything has changed in ways we could never be prepared for. I’m miserable because I can’t define it and I need to. This begs for comprehension. I have to try and understand every angle and implication, because if I don’t and I mess up, this won’t end in some silly forehead smacking anecdote we can laugh about afterwards, this is me in a very real position to literally hurt you in the most deadly of ways. This can all fall apart at an instant and it’s happening too fast for me to keep up with and I can’t-I can’t, Phil.” 

There’s a weight to his words he can feel hanging above their heads. He can see the physical burden of it displayed in the slightly bowed posture of Phil’s back, the way he leans forward ever so slightly, like a tree bough heavy with ice, ready to snap under an once more of pressure. At the same time, Dan thinks it would take more than even this for Phil’s steadfast resiliency to break, but he doesn’t want to test the theory. As it is, every time he opens his mouth to speak he feels like a storm, reckless and wild, without any organization to all the thoughts vying to be voiced, crowding to the back of his lips in a surge. If he had time he might prepare bullet points, tick off every thought with cogency, neatly arrange them all to voice as aptly as any prepared script for his videos, but a part of him is convinced that given a lifetime in which to rehearse he still wouldn’t be able to express himself adequately to his liking.

“This is-this is eternity, Phil. Knowing that it’s not a joke anymore that I will outlive you, that I could kill you, that I can hear every thud of your heart in your chest and be reminded of how different we are now. Do you know what this is? What I am? No wonder every vampire in fiction is neck deep in angst. To be human and then to be something else in the course of one night and understand the implications of eternal longevity tempered with the price of human blood. To know that you’ll die, either by consequence of your own natural life or because one day I’ll just snap and drink from you- How do I navigate this? How can you just sit there and stare at me and say nothing except that you’re ‘sure of me?’”

“Because it’s true. You’re talking as if all this is new and in a way it’s not. It’s always been there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That violent urge. Everyone has the option to hurt people physically or verbally. It’s always there, but you’ve never liked the idea of hurting anyone if you could help it, even before you became a…vampire.”

“I didn’t have a thirst for blood then, Phil. It puts a lot into perspective.”

“But you still haven’t given into it. You haven’t attacked anyone.”

“Or maybe it’s just a matter of time.”

“Or maybe you’re overthinking this and making it more complex than it needs to be.”

“More complex? It’s already past the point of complex! It’s absurd, it’s not right.”

“Of course it’s not right, but despite all that, you’re still you. You’re here with me and not out there stalking the Tube, attacking everyone in London because you made the choice not to.”

“I just drank blood from a container, Phil, it’s not really that big of an accomplishment once I’m not hungry anymore.”

“If you want to keep writing yourself off I can’t stop you, but when you walked home with me, you were hungry and desperate. You could have darted off at any time or attacked me instead, but you didn’t.”

“And again, I’m telling you, that’s all I was thinking about the entire way home and the only thing stopping me from doing it was the thought of drinking what was left in the fridge. You know, we’ve had this kind of conversation before about keeping wild animals as pets and it only being a matter of time before they eat your face.”

“Do you want to eat my face?”

“No! That isn’t the point.”

“It is. You’re not a wild animal.”

“Whatever I am now begs to differ.”

“Okay…” Phil takes a breath and sets his shoulders, the only indication that he was growing mildly impatient with Dan’s side of the conversation. “How about who you are? What does he say?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“No, I think it’s the other way round.”

Dan grits his teeth and takes to pacing again, every bit like the wild caged animal Phil denied him to be.  
“Do you know what it is that I can hear you now? That I can hear every pulse in your chest like a bass line through your veins? That I can smell it, metallic and sweet? It’s your life and I can take it now. I could take it without wanting to and enjoy it while I’m doing it. Phil, this isn’t me looking for encouragement to make videos or be true to myself-this is me as something that can kill you and it isn’t angst, it isn’t me looking for a pity party, this is me telling you I listen to you and I hear every pulse in your throat and past your chest and it’s the most intoxicating dangerous sound I’ve ever heard- this is me telling you I watch you and think about how easy it would be to take you right there on the couch before you could say a word.”

A beat follows as Phil’s jaw works silently and it takes a second longer for Dan to realize what he’d just said.

“Right. That last bit could have been better phrased.”

“It’s still you. Even with all this-it’s still you.”

“Please, don’t be disingenuous.”

“Daniel.”

They both blink, neither of them used to hearing their full proper names spoken between them and never with the rumble of authority now coloring Phil’s voice. Phil presses on with a rare look of commanding sternness on his face that Dan had only glimpsed when he was entrenched in a business call or filing important papers and didn’t want to be interrupted, a look that warns him off from speaking until Phil was done.

“I may not be aware of some things, but I’m not naïve. I can’t say I understand what happened to you or why or how, but I don’t think you really do either. Do you?”

“No.”

“Exactly. But you’re not hiding away. You didn’t hurt me even if, as you said, it would have been so easy for you. You put everything on the line for me back there too, because of me, just the same way you did when you allowed me to encourage you years ago when we first talked, because you never would have come this far if you hadn’t believed in yourself enough to try- If you hadn’t believed everything I told you that I saw in you. You risked more when we moved in together in Manchester, when we started the radio show and some weren’t sure what we had would work or that I would work when suggestions were made that maybe you might be better suited to hosting the show alone. I remember you told me that if those people didn’t appreciate me, then they would eventually learn how. You stayed with me no matter what anyone said, no matter how many doubts you might have had along the way.” 

“I never doubted-”

“It doesn’t matter if you did-you stayed. You were brave and you stayed with me and even now that hasn’t changed. And I want to do the same. I want to stay, but it’s like you’re trying to convince me not to. I already know how dangerous this all is, but it’s just one more risk in a list of ones we’ve already taken. Nothing is going to change this situation we’re in so we might as well just see it through to the end, like we always have. I’ll put everything on the line for you too. If you just let me.”

Heat suffuses Dan’s face from the top of his forehead to trickle down the sides of his throat and for an instant, he sees Phil as he did when they’d met without the barrier of a computer screen between them, when Phil had stood in front of him for the first time, physical and true, a figure with the same open and welcoming persona as the one he’d first seen on a youtube video years ago. He feels like that same young and vulnerable teenager again, reckless and driven to go anywhere, to do anything, as long as Phil was by his side.

“You did too,” he says, his voice low and thick with an emotion he still isn’t sure is love or fondness or both.

“What?”

“You risked everything for some kid, some ponce with ridiculous hair who had an interest in your videos even when you couldn’t have been sure I wasn’t just putting on airs to garner your attention before I would up and leave without a word, moving on to the next best up and coming youtuber to leech praise off of. That’s not a small thing you did-asking me to move in with you, letting me film together with you whilst putting up with the best and worst of me. It’s incredible. Some nights I think about it, you know, just the magnitude of it all, how we started out, where we are now, what you did for me, what you still do-it’s a wonder sometimes that I can sleep at all. So don’t say you’d risk everything now, because you always have. From the very start. It was always you.”

“If that’s true then don’t leave.”

“I never said-I don’t want to-”

“This whole conversation has felt like you trying to convince us both that it’s the only logical solution when there’s nothing logical about this at all. No, don’t think about it. When you do that I feel like I’m losing you. If you say you don’t want to then don’t.”

“It’s not that easy. You always make things sound so simple. Things just work when I’m with you, but I’m not sure this is one of them.”

“You weren’t sure of a lot of things before you started and look where you are now.”

“Where I am now is wrestling with being something other than I used to be. This is fangs and hunger and blood, Phil, not a trial and error play at improving my editing skills.”

“Everything is trial and error.”

“Not when it’s your life on the line!” Dan’s voice escapes him in a guttural bellow that rings through the room, desperate for Phil to understand the magnitude of everything he’s willfully ignoring. “There’s a court out there that knows I defied it, a bloody parliament of vampires, and now we’re both in danger and all of it is because of me.”

“If we were able to survive what happened tonight then I think we can find a way to get through the rest of it.”

“We-this is _my_ problem.”

“In this house it’s ours.” Phil abruptly stands up from the couch and makes his way to the door of the lounge.

“Where are you going?” The fear returns as Dan watches Phil turn his back to leave and he resists the impulse to rush forward and yank him back into the room.

“To bed. I’m tired, I think you should rest too. We’ve both had a long day. Night. And even if I don’t know much about what you are right now I think even vampires need some shut eye.” He turns as if to leave again, but pauses before looking back over his shoulder. “I don’t regret anything, not at all. If I’m perfectly honest I’ve had the best years of my life at your side and the plan will always be about being your best friend. That hasn’t changed. It never will. If you think about nothing else, just think about that. I trust you. That won’t change either.”

Dan swallows hard and as he stands there it occurs to him that he suddenly knows the source of the strange odor he’d detected earlier wafting around Phil in a small electric aura he’d struggled to define.

“You’re scared. I can smell it on you.”

“Of course I’m scared! So are you!” Phil laughs, a desperate humorless sound. “I’m scared of that look on your face, not the hunger, the one that says you’ve made the decision to leave because you’ve managed to convince yourself this is a crisis you can’t win. No one changes unless they make the decision to, no matter what’s happening around them. Circumstances don’t change you unless you let them-unless you want them to. We’re different than we were years ago, but not much has really changed since then, because we keep the best parts of ourselves and acknowledge the things we had to leave behind to grow into better people. Isn’t that what you told me, why you haven’t deleted your past videos? We have a history. Together. And there’s no reason why the future has to be any different unless you want it to be. You decided you didn’t want to hurt me and you didn’t. You decided to help me even when it wasn’t in your best interest to. And I may not have whatever strength or abilities you have now, but I’ll stay with you through all of this if you’ll just let me.”

Phil stands in the doorway, one foot in the hall and the other in the lounge, balancing literally on the precipice as he waits for a response and Dan can only stare, not trusting himself any further to speak. The storm continues to thunder and grumble outside but Dan can barely hear it now. The heat spreads down his throat to his chest and he idly wonders if this was what it felt like to be inundated with love. To drown in something at once so exquisitely painful, a consuming emotion that rivals even the moment when he’d been lost to the satisfaction of his quenched thirst.

“What does it smell like?” Phil asks quietly.

“What?” Dan’s thoughts take a moment to come back online and understand the question.

“Fear-I’m just curious. What does it smell like?”

I don't know-erm-a bit corrosive-like the crackling static on an old television when it’s turned off or when you walk into an electronics store and it’s just that smell of all those wires, televisions and speakers plugged in and working. I don’t really know why that’s fear-I just sense that it is. Like an ingrained instinct I suppose.”

“Oh. Right.” Phil makes as if to sniff his underarms before catching himself. “I should probably wash up in the morning then.”

“It-I don’t think it works like that.”

He doesn’t say he had also smelled love, knew it automatically without question and that it was a high sweet attar that overpowered the tinny smell of fear, a scent he’d almost missed because Phil’s usual mix of soap and cologne smelled like that anyway, fresh and warm and good. He isn’t sure now if the scent is love or just Phil or simply that both have become synonymous with each other.

We are a pair aren’t we, he thinks. It had been that way from the very beginning, when Phil had stole his way into every waking thought, progressed from an idle point of interest in Dan’s life to a person who had become an integral part of his soul, until, one day, they had both become a nexus unto each other without realizing it. A part of him wants to write verses of what it is he feels, to make sense of everything in words he can look back on later in reflection and he remembers something he’d heard once in a crowded meetup amongst other youtubers, “you two have the kind of connection that poets and singers rhapsodize about.” It was a comment meant with good natured levity, only half serious, but he recalls the words now with renewed interest as he stares at Phil and concludes that maybe it wasn’t necessary to make sense of this connection between them at all. Perhaps it was just enough that it existed without the need to codify it into labels and definitions that would always fall short to describe them.

He suddenly has the inexplicable desire to take Phil’s hand and leave together through the door out into the world, anywhere, somewhere they can take leave of their thoughts and the current situation as if he weren’t a newborn vampire with a hunger he could barely control.

 _Japan would be lovely_ , he thinks in a rush, _Tokyo. Osaka. Kyoto. We could tour the entire country. He wants to go, I want to go- really what better time could there be when we just want to escape and we might never have the time again? Let’s just go, god, let’s go. Comfort in escape, relief in something new. We’ll catch a night flight. Make stopovers if we have to. Let’s just go._

“Dan?”

“We could get away,” Dan says quickly, “Go to Japan or anywhere far away from any night court. We could just go. Right now.”

Phil smiles with a slow shake of his head and Dan already knows what he’s going to say before he says it.  
“One day we will, but not tonight. You know that wouldn’t work.”

“I know, I know…but I want to. Just for right now.”

“Just for right now, until whatever happens happens, we’re still here. Together. So just get some rest. You can stay and pace and think about it all you want, but eventually you need to rest.”

“Suppose I can’t really use the phrase ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead’ anymore can I?”

Phil gives him a strained smile and Dan wishes that, along with his new strengths, he had also been granted the foresight of being able to know when to shut up.

“I’ll just…grab another blanket since you have my duvet.” Phil says.

“Take it. I’m sorry I er-wrecked your room a bit when I swiped it.”

“It’s fine. You needed it. Now I understand why you blocked all the windows in your room. I don’t think trying to sleep in your closet would have been very comfortable anyway.”

“No. Very appropriate though given the whole monsters in closets trope. Maybe I should just try it for the irony.”

“Maybe.” Phil looks off and away down the hall to his bedroom with a longing look of severe fatigue. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to head off. You really should do the same.”

Dan nods, trying to feign a nonchalance he doesn’t feel. Phil is only going to bed. It’s only reasonable he thinks, given how much he’s been through, but at the same time he feels cast adrift again, desperate not to be left alone although their bedrooms were right across the hall from each other. There’s no thirst to worry about now, not for the time being and in its place he has a need for proximity instead, for the calming assurance of presence before the next evening arrived with new surprises he wasn’t sure he’d be ready to face. But all he does is smile and wave Phil off on his way.

“Right. I’ll see you tomorrow. Or during the evening anyway.”

Phil lingers for a moment longer in the doorway, then gives Dan a reassuring nod that holds more regard in that one simple gesture than any words he might have said, before he turns away. Dan listens to his soft tread down the hall and the subtle creak of his bedroom door opening and then closing with a small click of finality leaving Dan alone with the soft pop and sizzle of the fire crackling in the fireplace and the sounds of a storm raging on outside unabated.

By this time the windows are thoroughly fogged over into sightless eyes that compel him to pull the blinds, if only not to have to see his own reflection staring back at him. He goes through the motions methodically, trying to think of nothing else but securing the lounge before turning in the way he did every night when he was the last one up, shutting off the television, darkening the fireplace and venturing out into the hall to snap off each light in turn until he’s enveloped in shadows that no longer disturb him the way they once did.

If he disregarded the cold stillness of his pulse and the low muted sounds of their downstairs neighbor’s heartbeat slowly drifting through the floor, he could almost pretend everything was normal. But as he comes to a stop in the space between his and Phil’s rooms to peer in at his own darkened bedroom with bedcovers shielding the windows and turning his otherwise comfortable space into a bleak cave, he finds himself not altogether ready to lock himself away into seclusion, knowing all he would do was walk around in tireless circles until the first rays of the sun cajoled him into sleep.

He didn’t want to be alone with the same old fear he suspected haunted most people at night if they weren’t given over to falling asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillow and if instead, like him, indulged a barrage of internal questions that swept up from the depths of their subconscious without warning, bringing questions that made him startling aware of his presence, of all his inhibitions and fears fettered and on display when he didn’t want to acknowledge him, when it was only him under a crowd of sheets tangled around his legs, his breaths filling the spaces of his room with the understanding that he was alone to wrestle with himself until he gave into exhaustion.

Some days he imagined liking it better if his room had been a small box of light framed by large plate glass windows overlooking an expansive forest of tall aspens and pines overshadowed by white clouds against a backdrop of blue sky- a refuge of light and peace away from the frenetic havoc of a city too expensive and conflicting for its own good- something more conducive to rest when at night his mind conspired to do anything but. He wasn’t ungrateful for the room he now had, one which boasted an area of space much larger than the small bedroom he’d slept in back in Manchester, but some days he dreamed of something a little different, of living somewhere he could take in nature from the comfort of a backyard they currently didn’t have. Now he’s aware that he’ll have to tailor his wishful daydream to accommodate eveningscapes of purpled skies and high plate glass windows with thick blinds and UV tinting to shield him from sunlight. In the meantime, the reality of his current bedroom, dark and stifling, continues to discourage him with the idea that it will be difficult, if impossible, to get any sleep at all tonight.

Phil’s closed bedroom door however offers up its own option, one he immediately acknowledges as soon as he looks over at it, but hesitates against choosing it.  
If he listens closely he can just hear the thud thud thud of a heart slowing its pace into the regular monotony of sleep, filling the room with the warmth of Phil’s presence. His own room by comparison is a portrait of silence and cold and rain battering against the glass of his windows. He takes in one door and then the other as if he were a contestant on a game show, trying to pick between door number one and door number two.

_Or like that story, The Lady or The Tiger, but I guess in this case I’d be the tiger wouldn’t I?_

In the end, he’s too tired and stretched past all endurance for overthinking his actions any further and without further hesitation reaches forward for the handle to Phil’s room, turns it and step inside.

He’d known Phil was tired but he’d underestimated just how quickly Phil could shed his clothes, store his contacts and crawl into the makeshift cocoon of blankets on his bed. The soft whisper of Phil’s breath filtering through his nose and the bass of his thudding heart quietly overtakes the room in a backdrop of sound that is thankfully, no longer an all-intrusive crescendo. It’s comforting in a way and Dan lingers on the threshold, mindful of his imposing presence, just listening to the sounds of warm life emanating from the blanket covered lump on the bed and for a moment he’s loathe to wake Phil up at all in lieu of allowing him some much needed sleep. The lonely promise of his bedroom however puts him off the idea and he remains in the doorway. He still has so much he needs to say, words that he’s not sure can wait till they see each other again tomorrow, not with the threat of so much uncertainty between them.

He feels guilty doing this, knowing that he’s standing here watching Phil lost in dreams, unaware of how Dan stands like a pensive wraith in the doorway.  
_I want to tell you_ , he thinks, _I want to talk to you, about everything, but it’s bigger than me, more than I can put into words and I don’t quite know how to go about it in a way that isn’t the verbal equivalent of me tripping over my shoelaces down the stairs._

He knows with Phil at least this is a moot point. Phil always listened to him with honest complacency no matter the subject, whether serious or not, always with a compassionate air that was never saccharine or false.

There are irrefutable truths, Dan thinks, like mathematical formulas, physics equations and the rotation of the stars in the sky-things that will always exist in their most empirical form without question regardless of belief and that is Phil, every atom of him comprised of care and of a love which he returns to the people around him in spades. The world harbored easy pitfalls which hurt and damaged in irrevocable ways and Phil seemed to have realized this early on so that every look and word is a practiced art of not adding to that reckless malice. It leaves Dan in awe to think about it. He knows between them they have shared numerous occasions where he’s tried Phil’s patience in one way or another, tonight being no exception, the very nature of their friendship, the way they were metaphorically and physically back to back in their living quarters, sharing cereal, shirts and floor space, allowed ample opportunities for him to push buttons without really meaning to, but in the end Phil is always there.

He moves to speak in the darkness, but he doesn’t know where to begin. Phil is still asleep and it would be too easy to spill his thoughts here and now where they would have no meaning come morning when Phil awoke, ignorant of the one sided confession Dan had whispered in the dark. It’s a way of confronting the issue and running away from it at the same time. He recalls the episode of Winnie the Pooh, with Christopher Robin kneeling down to tell Pooh the ‘not very nice news’ and how Pooh had comically frolicked off back into the Hundred Acre Wood, willfully ignorant of the heart breaking departure Christopher Robin had been about to impart. He almost laughs at the idea of making that comparison with himself now, but it’s nearly the same. What he wants to say could mean a departure of ways, could mean he would have to go or Phil would leave or-

He’s angry with himself suddenly, fed up with his show of reticent cowardice and in a flash of impatience grits his teeth as he stalks over to shake Phil awake from whatever dream he’d been exploring.

Phil comes to gradually with bleary eyed confusion, blinking for a few minutes, trying to see past the blur of darkness before him to discern the figure and form of Dan shaking his shoulder.

“Whuzz-whuzzit?”

He’s not quite awake yet, caught in a fitful stage between true sleep and awareness so his voice comes muffled and whispery, his fringe sticking up at comical angles from his face which Dan would find an endearing point to tease him about if the topic of conversation hadn’t been so sobering and crucial.

“Dan? What is it?” He fumbles for the glasses by his bedstand and Dan hands them over. “What’s going on?

“Do you remember that time when we went to Jamaica and it was nighttime and we could see those stars…not like here in the city where the light pollution and smog dilutes it all, like it was very clear, all this immensity densely populated with stars which you knew were always there all along, but somehow seeing them without the benefit of a telescope was-god it was- you remember? It was so overwhelming neither of us could say anything for a few good minutes. Do you remember?”

Phil stares, his eyes widening a little more with every word Dan says trying to figure out why he’d been woken up so abruptly to discuss the memory of a trip they had taken years ago.

“It’s like that now. Right now.” He’s fumbling for coherence and his tongue lays dry and sour in his mouth as he attempts to find the right words. “The only thing I understand about what’s happened to me is that it’s greater than I can comprehend. I don’t know what’s going to happen. That would be true even if I wasn’t a vampire, but this whole experience has taught me to say exactly what I mean, right now, not when it’s too late to matter anymore. Some things are just too important to wait, some people too.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know. Listen. Can I just…sit here for a minute?”

“Yeah. Of course.” Phil straightens up on the bed, still groggy and confused, but growing more alert. “Of course you can.”

“Back there, in the kitchen before you left, when I snapped,” Dan begins slowly, “what I said before. I didn’t mean it.”

“When you said I was useless?”

“I didn’t mean it. Not a word of it.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know that, but I need to tell you again. They always say you never know how much something means to you until it’s gone and for a minute back then, if I had been a minute later, you almost-I’ve always thought I didn’t want to be old and grey with rocking chair regret looking back on all the things I should have said to the people that mattered when I had the chance to. You know, not bottling things up out of fear or because I was ‘too cool for school’ to be emotional, but even though I have the probability of centuries ahead of me to exist or maybe just one more night depending on what this ‘night court’ decides to do to me, I don’t want to think about not having told you how much you mean to me. Because you mean everything. All these years…you could have had anyone else, stayed with anyone else and you stayed with me.”

“Same with you isn’t it?” Phil murmurs. “Eloquent, talented, even more followers than me now-you could have done just fine without me.”

 _No, not at all_ , Dan thinks, _none of this could have worked without you. This is a kinetic bond, you move and I move after you, together. And if it’s true something of the stars is in our veins, that we share hydrogen bonds and iron, that we are equal parts star stuff, then whatever stars made up your bones, whatever interstellar frission was involved in your anatomy, I must share some part of it too, because what we have is sempiternal and I don’t know how to explain it, how exactly it came to be, I just know that it is, so no, I couldn’t have done ‘just fine’ without you. Not knowing what I do now, not having seen what we’ve managed to accomplish together. It will always be about you. About us. Together._

“No,” he says aloud, “you’re wrong. Without you I could have never-When you left before I wasn’t sure if you’d come back and when I found you I wasn’t sure if I’d get to you in time and, if I’m honest, if that had happened, I would have died twice. You are incredibly important and I needed-I just wanted to tell you--I want-”

He stops and roughly pushes his hair back from his forehead in frustration. It’s one thing to pore over the words in his head and another to voice them correctly in a way that carried over the importance of everything he meant to say without it sounding cheap or incomplete.

“What is it? What do you want?” Phil’s voice is low and thick with sleep but the look he gives is alert and sure, an intense unblinking stare that Dan struggles hard not to look away from.

“Tell me,” Phil says.

That had always been the one constant about Phil which had never wavered, the way Dan would suggest something, an idle idea or fervent wish and Phil would invariably rise to the occasion to obtain it. All he had ever needed to do was say, ‘I want, I wish, I need’ and if within reason and his power to fulfill, Phil would make it so. Dan thought that if he one day suggested they should start a museum, write a book together or organize a worldwide tour Phil would immediately move without question to puzzle over exactly how it could be done until it was. It was the same tireless dedication that fueled his creativity for videos and prompted Dan to pause outside his closed bedroom door to listen to the makings of another snapshot into Phil’s life as if he hadn’t already heard the story before it featured in front of thousands in a youtube video.

That same burning fervor is directed at him now, waiting breathlessly for an answer, but every word tangles up in Dan’s throat until finally, stymied with too many emotions to make sense of one to speak, he settles for a nod in Phil’s direction, a quick, curt tilt of his head and Phil grasps the message, translating it effortlessly as he shifts to one side and allows space for Dan to lay next to him in bed.

Almost immediately, as soon as he toes off his shoes and props the pillow up against the headboard to lean back against it, he feels better, content to lay there with Phil’s shoulder and arm pressed along his side in a comforting line of warmth through his shirt. It’s a catalyst of comfort that coaxes his courage and settles his nerves and once more, he tries to gather his words to speak.

“When I was living in Berkshire, other than Reading festival, there really wasn’t anything else extraordinary about being there. Most of the time, I never imagined myself staying close to home for any length of time after I finished school. I just wanted to leave that chapter of my life behind me. Not that there weren’t some good things about it. The countryside particularly is beautiful and apparently it’s one of the places Tolkien was inspired by to write Lord of the Rings. I used to walk my dog near these old woods by my house. It was such an old, dense place, nothing like the Forest of Dean, but close. I could understand how he was able to imagine all those stories by just walking down the paths there. If you’re not careful it’s easy to get lost with the way it all winds together like a maze and sometimes I thought I’d like to do just that. Get lost in it forever. If you looked up long enough at the canopy of leaves and how the sun cut through them like stained glass you could imagine that you weren’t strictly there, not in England, but somewhere else just as magical and ancient as Middle Earth. And I used to think that if the fae did exist, elves, the fair folk or however you want to call them, they’d be in that forest. It was such a surreal feeling. Time was suspended and it was just me surrounded by all this majesty and I wanted to bask in it because it felt incredible, like nothing so beautiful could be so real, but it was.”

Phil’s gaze is rapt and unwavering as he continues. Eyes darkened by the shadows of the room, but no less bright and blue.

“Sometimes that what’s it’s like to look at you and I have to convince myself that it’s real-that you’re real and I get to be with you like this. Like the way we saw the stars in Jamaica that one night. It wasn’t just that we were able to see them, it was the realization that we were able to be there at all, in that time and place, looking at them together.”

Dan looks down at his hands and flexes the fingers to feel the power through his bones now made to rend whatever they held in their grasp. He glances over then at Phil’s hands lying sedately in his lap, pale and unmistakably human, with a grasp that, for all its fumbles with broken bowls and dropped phones, never held an ounce of intentional hurt.

“Whatever I am right now,” he says, “however impossible and incredible it is, it will never measure up to you. You will always be the most captivating person I’ve ever met and sometimes I wonder how on earth you could have ever decided to be best friends with me at all. You, just as you are, has always been enough. The same way it’s enough for you that I stayed, it’s enough for me too. Just you.” He points at Phil’s chest to indicate the heart and soul of him, the core source of a personality that makes the best words falter at the back of his mouth.

The smell lingering around Phil, the not-smell tinge of love he’d noticed earlier, peaks into a full bodied potency that makes him instantly think of flowers in bloom, of a springtime awakening ushering in a world, lush and verdant, to rival the ancient bowers of the woods he’d once wandered as a boy with a dog at his side and a head full of dreams, content for a moment in time to be lost in a beauty that failed his best attempts to describe.

He looks away with self-conscious doubt at the drawn blinds over Phil’s windows and listens to the rain drumming furiously against the glass. Beneath it he can hear Phil’s heart, a lazier, hypnotic quarter note beat, which fills the silence between them and he wonders how it had to take becoming something other than human, something that could silence that heart with a quick dart of his fangs, for him to spill his thoughts with an effusion of sentiment that makes him feel more awkward than the time he’d accidentally unraveled a friend’s bikini top at the beach.

“Say something. Even if it’s telling me to shove off to my own bed.”

Phil laughs and when Dan turns to look at him his face is slightly red, eyes bright with something Dan can’t tell whether from the onset of allergies or overwhelmed emotion.  
“It’s just…how can I reply to that? You’ve never said anything like that to me before.”

“I always try to say it. Just not in so many words.”

“So you mean all the alien emojis you’ve ever sent me was code for this?”

“Pretty much. And all the times I make you a Ribena even when you’re right by the kitchen and I couldn’t be bothered to move otherwise.”

Phil nods with a smile before clearing his throat and looking away, suddenly very interested in teasing at a bit of lint stuck on his bedcovers.

“What would it be like if you wrote it?” Phil asks after some time had passed.

Dan gives a quizzical look, confused by the abrupt question.

“You said you’d much rather write about being a vampire instead of living it like you are now and I was wondering how it would be if you did write it?”

“I was speaking hypothetically. It’s not like I dedicate my spare time to writing fanfictions about myself, but maybe…I don’t know…if we’re talking about it then, you’d be the vampire.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you’re halfway there already, what with your complexion that’s past fair and on its way into the realms of translucent.”

“Hey, I tan. Somewhat.”

“A tan. Which for you is a freckle and one shade above pale known as slightly less pale.”

“I don’t remember your adventure at turning into a Baywatch extra being much better.”

“Oi!” Dan lightly shoves at Phil’s arm as he laughs.

“So if I were the vampire in the story, what about you? Go on, I’m curious.”

Dan stares. “You really want me to-right.” He gives in, thinking that although unexpected, this subject was an easier mode of conversation than stumbling over a well of sentiment that drowned him before he could speak. “Well, I guess as you’d be the vampire, you’d turn me.”

“Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe I’d just buy a sleek leather duster and a DeSoto with blacked out windows and drive around town for a bit.”

“Why is everything Buffy with you?”

“I’m just saying, maybe I don’t find you appetizing enough to bite.” Phil smirks and Dan begins to wonder if maybe waking Phil up might not have been the best idea as heat trickles along the edge of his jaw.

“Sorry to burst your bubble, ‘Amazing William the Bloody,’ but this is my fanfiction here, not yours.”

“Not very realistic then. Although if I were a vampire maybe I’d see the appeal. Better drinking from you than pig’s blood anyway.” 

“Thanks. I think.”

“I never asked you before…what is it like?” Phil asks. “To be a vampire, I mean.”

Dan pauses for an answer. “I don’t know. It’s a lot of things all at once. Confusing? Horrific? But also, powerful. Intoxicating. I feel like I could do anything, just steal out over London rooftops and drink from anyone I wished to, just by following their heartbeats, seeking out the sound and biting into their throat to drink. And when I do drink-God. It’s incredible. I’ve never felt that way before, the taste takes over everything and you feel alive, like it’s seeping into every corner of your bones and skin. Like an intense make out session where you’re in the moment, lost to everything else but the other person and what they’re doing to you and the power of that feeling when your body is just-”

He cuts off as he notices Phil’s wide eyed stare and a twinge of self-awareness at their proximity on the bed, of the heat of Phil’s presence next to him as he talks about comparing blood lust to make out sessions, makes him cough before continuing. “It’s-er- this incredibly intimate experience.”

“And knowing that you’d still let me bite you?”

“What?”

“In your story. You said I’d be the one to turn you.”

Dan gapes, openmouthed like a fish before he’s able to speak, mentally backpedaling away from the insinuation. “I wasn’t being serious, Phil. It was just a stupid idea-I didn’t actually mean it.”

_Maybe._

His thoughts provide a silent addendum he isn’t entirely sure Phil doesn’t notice, the way his stare lingers, thoughtful and considering.

“If I were a vampire, I would turn you.” He says in such a quiet tone Dan almost misses it over the louder noise of rain outside and the soft beat of his heart. “I wouldn’t want to go it alone. Eternity. It’d be more fun with you.”

“Eternity is a long time. I’m sure you’d get tired of me eventually.”

“No,” Phil says, “If we’re on the subject of hypotheticals, then hypothetically I wouldn’t mind spending eternity with you and if we’re speaking literally, what we have right now, this time right here, just this-I’d still want to spend whatever is left of it together. As we always have.”

Dan can hear Phil’s heart speed up ever so slightly to punctuate his conviction and it’s that same brilliant certainty which never ceases to catch Dan off guard, even so many years later after their first meeting offline. He hadn’t considered the prospect of traveling through the centuries without Phil, not with a bevy of other concerns fighting for his attention, but now that he thinks about it, the idea of losing Phil and going on without him seizes the next breath in his chest.

_It’s not just because your absence would leave me hollow in ways that I don’t like to think about. There’s always been more to you than a placeholder for good company. I could go a millennia searching and I’m sure I’d never find someone like you again. This has gone far beyond the convenience of two people sharing common interests; it’s more than just you acknowledging me all those years ago as a friend worthy of meeting in person and collaborating with professionally. You are so much more than a convenient voice, more than just than the one who put up with me from the very beginning to whatever eventual end may come._

The years can test bonds and break down two people to the brittle core of who they really were, exposing less savory sides of their characters, more detrimental flaws and anxieties, but through it all Phil has remained and he finds himself unwilling to entertain the possibility of a future in which Phil was not there.

“I thought about it once, you know. That I should have a good life,” he says. “Then you came along and made it amazing.”

Phil’s laugh is immediate and fond. “Is that a pun?”

“Maybe. But you did, you know. And you are. I think I’d like to keep this, us, in this way. I’m just afraid of what that means, later on, now that everything has changed so much.”

“Things always change. That’s how things are,” Phil murmurs and sidles closer against Dan’s shoulder. “I remember you said once before about how important it was to do everything necessary to ensure happiness for the future.”

“Wow, I didn’t know you were such a fan to remember that.”

“Not really. Just a casual observer.”

Dan places a hand over his chest in mock dismay. “Ouch.”

“I always thought you were right about that-Trying to live a life around ensuring happiness. It’s a good hope to hold onto. Or at least it helps when nothing else does or when everything else just seems absolutely mad.” 

“Well, this situation is mad.”

“We’re still here. That’s one more thing to hold onto.”

“Mmm. Will that be enough in the end? There are so many factors here to think about. Have you ever considered-” He’s about to trail off on a frenetic edge of worry, to begin a monologue on the risks and travails of what they now face, when he leans in closer to bridge the closing gap of distance between them and accepts the small invitation he’d seen on Phil’s face since he’d laid on the bed, moving forward to brush his mouth against Phil’s, soft and slow.

It’s the barest touch, a feather light pressure, but it’s excruciating and blissful all the same, instantly blotting out his internal run-on diatribe of worry.

There’s a lot about kisses he’s always enjoyed. The building heat of it, the playful nips and silent conversation of affection between sighs and tongue and lips, but it’s the danger of it that captivates him, the constant threat of the teeth behind those lips, the ever present promise that they could rend and pierce more effectively than any cutting barb of words. With someone trusted however that danger turned into an assurance of trust, an exchange of confidence and intimacy. As his own fangs lurk quiet in his mouth he understands how simple it would be to pin Phil beneath him, hold him more securely than the way Phil’s hands now wrap around his wrists, slide his fangs into Phil’s throat and drain him against the bed sheets.

At that thought he wonders at how much between them has changed. Which is me, he thinks, and which is just the hunger and which is just the part that’s too intrigued with Phil to differentiate? It’s a strange cross wired frustration-the part that wants Phil and the part that _wants_ him, to sink in fangs and quietly drink from him, etch Phil’s life into the marrow of his bones, through the threaded framework of his veins, in a more physical union than he would have otherwise felt comfortable thinking about if he couldn’t hear the pulse flowing along like a pass of electricity that innervates him every time Phil’s fingers ghost a path down his arms. But he doesn’t want that, even as his imagination slides the visions into his mind, tantalizing him with the idea of giving in and biting down, he twists his head to the side, leans further against the headboard and closes his eyes, offering his throat instead to Phil’s questing touch.

When Phil hesitates he turns back to see him questioning, ‘is this alright?’ and Dan arches up and grits his teeth, yes of course, he means to convey, please, let’s not think about it anymore, please. The last please he murmurs aloud, a quick blurted whisper that Phil captures with his mouth.

The scent wafting off him now is spiced and rich, love in full season, and Dan thinks if there was a way to bottle the essence of it most perfumeries would be out of business in a week.

The first time Phil’s hand slides from the side of his face down to rest along the side of his throat, Dan resists the urge to squirm away, half from the jolt of tingling overstimulation that slides at once over his skin and half at the memory of Yilmaz’s fangs piercing the exact spot where Phil’s hand now lingers. It’s a mark of vulnerability, another situation in which Phil could seize the opportunity to return in kind what had almost befallen him in the alleyway, bare his teeth and inflict a vicious turn of payback for all he’d been made to endure the entire day. Dan is certain that it wouldn’t kill him, not physically at least and the pain, however sudden and sharp would be overwhelmed instantly by his blood, healing whatever superficial wounds or bruises Phil made, if the encounter with the vampire earlier tonight was any indication. Phil however only breathes along his throat, nosing at the skin with a careful gentleness that Dan can barely endure and as he continues to offer his neck to the kisses Phil offers he thinks he was wrong, this isn’t fangs and hunger and blood at all, this is something better-greater than he can contain and as Phil works a small path back up his throat, along his jaw to settle once more at his mouth, shivering his arms a pebbled texture as he rolls his hips and sighs, breathless, he thinks, this is some kind of devastation that not even the sensation of drinking blood could compare to.

What he’d felt in the kitchen was the same frantic hazy lust he’d once felt as a teenager with too many hormones surging in his brain and a needy desperation to make the best of an urge without any motivation other than satisfying it and getting on with his day. This however is greater than just the blind need to get off or satisfy a blood thirst, it’s a communication of sorts, one step above how they normally spoke with covert glances and a quirk of a smile, always knowing somehow what the other was thinking, stepping in line to a connection that could only exist between good friends. And he’s aware as Phil worries at his bottom lip with a careful pressure of his teeth, that this is one element of their relationship that, although not untoward or unexpected, isn’t necessary to convey their affections.

 _But it’s nice_ , he thinks at the same time, _when it feels natural like this, as if we were just waiting for the right moment. We could have not done this and I would have been okay with it, but right now, for right now, this is good. This is perfect._

He pulls the breath that escapes between Phil’s lips, and returns it with a gasp of his own. He wishes it could be this way forever, that they could dull the roar of the world and its dangers for a time until every sound and second in the universe ticks by with them at its epicenter, their hands drawing out small noises that ask each other to stay right where they are.

Dan gradually slumps down against the headboard, allowing gravity and Phil’s gentle pulls to tug his back flush with the mattress, until Phil is a solid line of warmth above him. Somewhere, on any number of social media circuits, there were thousands of people living vicariously through their videos, imagining what might be or could be and he’s living the moments as they are, without guilt or remorse, greedily devouring the attention Phil lavishes with his stare and his mouth. Then Phil leans in, rolls the pressure of his hips against Dan’s so he can feel the hard exacting demonstration of his pleasure full against his thigh and Dan finds it very hard to think of anything at all outside the small world of Phil’s room. His mind whites out to one blank slate of emotions he might only be able to pictorialize with exclamation marks and grawlixes all in a row.

He’s aware of his face pressed sideways into the pillow, eyes half open and dazed as keening sounds spill from the back of his throat and Phil looks on rapt and silent with a wide eyed look between fascination and cunning. He’s cataloguing everything, Dan realizes, staring, soaking in every detail of which moves elicit what noises from Dan’s mouth, what he likes and what ensnares his breath until he’s choking back a whimper before it can escape between them. Phil sees everything and Dan is caught as surely as if he were the prey, pinioned between nothing more than a stare and Phil’s gentle weight above him, steadily bearing down, finding a rhythm in the coil and glide. Here Phil demonstrates a coordinated grace he might not otherwise sustain when walking into the clear glass of the kitchen door or stumbling over his own feet while simply walking over the carpeted hallway. Here he instinctively moves with an exacting purpose that shreds every breath from Dan’s mouth and turns it into an aching, yearning sound, leaving him a mass of gritted teeth and flustered skin, the whole of him reaching and wretched for more.

He hears himself whispering incoherent jumbles of phrases of which, yes and oh and Phil feature predominantly, until the words blur together into something archaic, an intonation of a chant, as close as he might ever come to worshipping anything or anyone outside of religion. There is something at once profane about the way Phil presses platitudes into his skin by way of kisses and caresses, chased by the searing looks he offers every time he ducks his head up to catch Dan’s gaze with his own, to make sure he still has Dan’s attention and all Dan can do is wonder dazedly how he could ever think otherwise, after all this time, all these years, the most rapt member of Phil’s audience had always ever been him.

It feels as if he’s being deconstructed into different versions of himself, coming apart piece by piece under the pressure of Phil’s hips and the sliding searing warmth of fingertips finding the bare cold skin of his chest beneath the shirt rucked up past his stomach. He’s bowed back into the mattress, mouth agape at the idea of being so utterly pinned, so exquisitely devastated by touch alone, overstimulated to a peak of arousal that aches at his jaw as he clenches his teeth against breathy guttural sounds that would leave him sounding more plaintive and yearning than he’s comfortable to hear pouring out of his mouth, but Phil teases at the sounds bottled up inside, every move a carefully planned exploration until he understands just what Dan likes, what he’s comfortable with, what is too gentle or rough for him to withstand and just that knowledge draws an inadvertent rumbling groan from Dan’s mouth that Phil returns in a deep bass against his throat. He wants to covet this moment, hold it fast between his teeth with vicious pride because it’s him, just two, just them.

“Only you,” he breathes out between a choked gasp and he’s not sure what he means to say after that exactly, but Phil smiles, adjusting his weight with a deft twist of hips and stomach that has Dan’s fingers curling into the bed sheets and saying, ‘oh, oh…’ like an epiphany half formed and gone again.

“Bear,” Phil replies then and the word is suddenly no longer an endearment, but a declaration, a low challenge. He tilts his head and stares, rapt, cunning.

“Bear,” he says again and presses the words against Dan’s shoulder, mouthing the thin fabric of his shirt as he says it again in the lowest octave his voice can drop before it drones out into a rumbling mumble that resonates past Dan’s skin and settles along his bones.

Dan’s fingers curl into small claws at the back of Phil’s head, fingers threading through his hair and pushing back a fringe, which although still damp and messy from the rain, remains soft and layered precisely the way he would love his own hair to be. It’s a silken tactile sensation he can’t get enough of and he isn’t aware of passing his hands through it repeatedly until Phil gently pulls away with a smirk and his head dips down to graze teeth along his collarbone in a manner that leaves Dan a writhing mess, mouth hanging open in a voiceless yell of shock. It’s as if Phil is deliberately pausing to focus on every insecurity he had about his body and meant to banish them all with a lingering kiss, spending minutes at a time on every spot which caused him any amount of embarrassment in a bid for Dan to associate the tactile sensations with positive reinforcement, so that every time he’s tempted to berate himself about the too deep shelf of his clavicle or the soft curves of his hips and stomach, the only thing he will be able to think about is how Phil’s mouth murmured half muffled praises into the skin that he could barely discern past the deeper tones of Phil’s heartbeat resonating into his ribcage and filling the silence left behind by his own too still heart- a sound cleaving past tissue, arteries and muscle to convey Phil’s adorations like morse code worked deep into the fiber of his anatomy, like a genetic transformation more visceral than when he’d been pinned to the floor beneath Yilmaz’s cold stare, drinking her blood to become a creature that had no business indulging in the warm pleasure of the human laying above it.

Dan remembers it’s not as if Phil is without his own insecurities which revealed themselves in small phrases and brief looks that recede with quick-fire speed in the wake of whatever more optimistic idea or plan for the day Phil might choose to comment on. To anyone else it was barely noticeable or if noticed at all given little thought in the idea that if Phil didn’t take time to comment on his fears or worries he must not find it that important. Dan, who has shared more years by his side to understand the unspoken gaps in between what Phil leaves unsaid, decides now is the best time in which to return Phil’s sensual platitudes with his own, until they both play the game of moving against one another in the dark, under the warm folds of the covers, exchanging compliments with the brushes of their lips, and the pressure of their fingertips caressing all the places which gave them pause in the morning light when alone with their reflections in the bathroom mirror.

The heat collecting in his stomach spreads its way down his thighs and along his legs, better than how he’d felt in the kitchen and he bucks up against Phil’s waist, hands carefully trailing their way down his spine in a way that Phil must like at how his heart’s quarter beat chorus speeds up into a repetitive staccato in his chest. In Dan’s mind it becomes a game and he tries to see what angle of his hips and what combination of his mouth and tongue will make Phil’s heart beat faster until the pulse skips and trots with an intensity to rival the storm outside.

Dan begins to notice pattern in the way Phil moves, his mouth dipping down to his chest, before slowly tracing a path back up to his mouth for another kiss, before he moves away, clavicle, stomach, then back for a kiss, until Dan laughs, flushed and drunk with intimacy.

“What is it with you and my mouth?”

“What is it with you and my everything,” Phil mumbles in reply and makes a point to glide against where Dan is fully hard in his jeans, drawing out the slide of his lower body, leaving Dan barely able to hold back a string of nonsensical ramblings too loud at this time of night to go unheard by the tenants below them.

“Shut up,” he manages to breathe out after a minute of straining against becoming a vocal disaster.

It’s a near thing however and he’s only just able to strangle each noise before it becomes a full-fledged aria of blissed out pleasure to rival the early morning sex routine of their neighbor below when he was woken promptly at eight o’clock by pained moaning he’d only heard in a gym when someone was struggling to lift a set of barbells larger than they were. He’s sure Phil must be aware of the state he’s in, even if his pulse no longer worked to convey his ardor the screwed up look of desperation on his face must be enough. His balls are drawn up tight and uncomfortable between his thighs, the pressured heat coalescing in his stomach and at his groin, bunching his pants and jeans against his arousal all leaves him half mad with the need to alleviate some of the discomfort by grasping himself between his fingers and stroking his way to orgasm, but Phil’s presence stops him from being impatient. Whenever he bucks up for more purchase Phil resolutely pushes down, forcing his hips and spine back against the mattress.

The smell of his blood, the not-smell of love and the smell that was just Phil at the end of the day, fills each breath he takes and his fangs itch and grow in his mouth, heavy this time with the need to bite and the need for release. The rough scrape of the plaster on Phil’s injured finger rubs at his cheek and he imagines turning his head and seizing it with his fangs until it bled. The part of him that entertained darker thoughts before rejecting them mixes with the part of him that is now purely vampiric, cajoling him to bite and take Phil’s warmth in a new, more physical way.

It’s a dangerous suggestion and he’s already overly cautious with the way his fingers interlock behind Phil’s back, careful not to apply any more pressure and end up cracking a rib or fracturing his spine without meaning to. But the desire to flip Phil over and grace his throat with an open mouthed kiss of fangs is overwhelming and he’s too worked up past the point of endurance to trust himself not to do it.

“God, Phil-” he twists his head back and to the side, flexing his throat into a taut curve and says, “bite. Just bite.”

“What?”

“Do it. Now. Please.”

 _Because if you don’t, I will_ , he thinks, _so give me that distraction before I decide biting you instead it’s the salient choice when I know it isn’t. Do it now before we finish this with me stopping your heart for good._

Phil stares a minute longer before relenting, delicately mouthing the front of his throat before nipping along with tiny pinprick bites that merely piques Dan’s frustration into a grimace. He surges up and places a hand at the back of Phil’s head and presses down just hard enough to get the message across and Phil translates it effortlessly as his gentle bite bears down with resolute force, hard enough that Dan knows a livid bruise will form later, a mottled plum colored mark that might linger if he were human, but as a vampire, will inevitably fade within moments of being inflicted. The shock of the renewed bite and its keen pressure however is enough to soothe the demands of his instincts and he calms, eyes wide as Phil moves to place another bite above the first one, teasing the skin into an inflamed surface of pained pleasure until his neck is alive and tingling with the ghostly imprint of Phil’s teeth in a broken necklace of bruises.

Their hips work against each other and Dan wriggles the already sagging waistband of his jeans the rest of the way down his hips, tangling them at his thighs to gain better friction. Phil speaks in a low murmur then, a garbled phrase of assent lost between a gritted moan and Dan bursts out laughing, abruptly taken aback by the low northern brogue that has become Phil’s voice.

Phil draws back, bewildered, as Dan presses the side of his face into the pillow, twisting away from the absurdity of the moment mixed with the very real and welcome weight of Phil’s lower body pressed against his own. It’s all too much that Dan can’t stop the laughing jag no matter how hard he tries and Phil waits patiently, trying to figure out the cause for Dan’s small break of sanity, understanding at least that the joke, whatever it was, isn’t at his expense.

“What?”

“You were gone for literally three days,” Dan finally says when he’s able to, between small gasps of laughter still filtering through his system. “Three days-how on earth do you lapse back to your roots so quickly-and in the middle of this?”

“You love it.” Phil smirks and Dan finds himself at odds to deny it.

When he wasn’t projecting for the camera, taking care to enunciate and perform, when at home Phil’s voice was a distinct treble lower than the tone he used in videos and meetups, one reserved for relaxed company and good friends. Like his pose when sitting in a chair or lying in bed, his voice could become unknowingly sensuous, something Dan had learned in detail when they’d shared the large king sized bed in a hotel room when double beds hadn’t been available. He’d awoken one morning to stare at Phil’s profile edged with the gold of a rising sun trickling in between the corners of the drawn curtains over the windows. He’d observed the sharp angles and curves of Phil’s features that, like most everything else about him, was beautiful without even trying; with a distinct feline quality to his sharp cheekbones and jawline, a delicate yet formidable physiognomy that brought to mind a cheetah he’d seen once at the zoo, limbs long and lithe with a powerfully built chest and a strength only seen when it took off in a burst of speed. He’d never credit Phil as a marathon runner of cheetah like prowess, but his own strengths were hidden in much the same way, exhibited only when he revealed them in the form of ideas for a video, a film script or song, providing another layer into the endless well of creativity which comprised his mind, all of it neatly summarized in a face that at the time, Dan could only stare at in mute fascination. Phil had woken up then, somehow sensing his stare the way all sleeping passengers on buses and trains did when they awoke at the exact moment he looked at them, and fixed him with a bleary eyed smile of genuine warmth that Dan had returned. After a second of consideration, he’d leaned forward minutely and Dan had watched him, eyes bright with intent curiosity and when his proximity hadn’t earned him a push backwards Phil had nuzzled in to the front of Dan’s throat and murmured, ‘good morning’ in a voice deepened by morning fatigue.

Dan had closed his eyes and shuddered around the small mumbled groan of shock which escaped his mouth in a sound audible only because the room was steeped in the thick quiet of the early dawn. Interested, Phil had done it again, another vibrato of a murmur that made Dan arch and turn beneath the touch of his lips and when he’d realized it was his voice which had elicited the reaction Phil couldn’t stop doing it in small moments throughout the day- When they were paused at the balcony window of their hotel room, when Dan stopped into the kitchen to make lunch, when Dan was gaining mileage in Mario Kart and he needed to devise a quick and inoffensive tactic to gain time, he’d lean over subtly and deposit another simple word of praise or observation in the space just before his ear in a simple, playful gesture which made Dan set his jaw and whip his head around to stare, eyes wide and fathoms deep in his face, trying to play off the obvious jolt that twitched along his spine and the muscles of his arms, as if he wanted to do nothing more than to snatch Phil to himself, envelop him and return the favor of that pleasure in kind. An act which at the time he had been unable to do, overwhelmed by too many conflicting ideas to make sense of an impulse he could only look back on in retrospect and wonder.

Phil’s pace above him quickens and Dan forgets about baritones and brogues and missed chances, lost to a spike of sensation that brings him to a writhing froth in which finally he can return pleasure for pleasure without devolving into overthinking every action.

He gasps every time his groin chafes against the hard angular shape of Phil’s hips and he feels the evident outline of Phil’s own pleasure pressed flush against his own. He’s right at the apex of release, straining for more stimulation as his hips find a rhythm with Phil’s, every upward undulation met with a reciprocatory grind down, until they’re moving as one, legs and arms entwined, his mouth open and shuddering against Phil’s jaw as each thrust brings him closer, edging him along to a state where he lets go of Phil and grabs at the mattress, afraid of crushing him at the point of orgasm when his arms might clench into an embrace too strong for Phil’s anatomy to withstand. Instead, he allows Phil to seize and surround him with his arms, the headboard softly tocking against the wall in a beat to match Phil’s heart until he grits his teeth, head twisting back and forth against the pillow, a line of heat surging a path down his chest into his stomach as he comes. Phil is not far behind with a few more decisive thrusts against him, arching down with a twist and a strangled shiver of a groan until he collapses, limp and breathing hard against Dan’s chest.

It takes some time before Phil’s heartbeat settles from its furious thudding canter and Dan is content to lay in a daze beneath him and listen until his heart slows into its normal quarter beat. It takes him a little longer to notice that the rain has waned to a quiet drizzle he can barely hear and his fears about what the next evening will bring no longer itch at his thoughts with the same relentless anxiety. For now, the lazy afterglow is enough and he turns his head to rest against the top of where Phil’s head is still settled along the front of his throat, tickling Dan’s chin with hair that’s become a porcupine’s nest of misaligned spikes. The bedsheets are yanked into bunched up wrinkles pulled off one side of the mattress and Dan’s jeans are a rumpled mess that have somehow drifted off one ankle and entrapped the other; Phil’s pajama pants meanwhile have migrated off his legs entirely and ended up on the floor in a bundle. Dan is content to ignore the disarray and the drying mess along his thighs in lieu of settling into a drowsier state of mind where disarrays and any variant thereof could be better handled the next day when he wasn’t busy trying to hold onto the buzzing warmth slowly dissipating from his body, like when he was slightly drunk and still aware enough to enjoy the heat of it.

He idly pokes the set of bruises on the side of his neck, still raw and tender although the pain is fast receding as the blood within him goes to work to mend broken capillaries and bring his skin back to an untouched shade of pale. A part of him wishes he could keep at least one to wonder over better in the bathroom light and remember the way Phil had lingered there, leaving a mark more crucial than those Yilmaz had inflicted on him.

Finally, after his breath has stilled and Phil’s heart has slowed, he cranes his head down and murmurs, “See, that right there, that noise you made at the very end, that’s what you want to channel for the beginning of Toxic.”

Phil looks up slowly and stares at him, silence unspooling between them as Dan struggles to remain deadpanned.

“Are you actually serious?”

“What?” Dan’s face is a neutral façade, but he knows Phil instantly sees right through to the lurking amusement underneath.

“You’re thinking of me singing Toxic after all that.”

“Well, it’s as good a time as any,” Dan begins to try and say but dissolves halfway through into a shaking fit of snorted laughter and Phil gently punches him on the arm before collapsing back against his chest.

“It wouldn’t work anyway, when I think about it I just can’t do it.”

“Oh, you can do it,” Dan murmurs in a voice too lurid for either of them to take seriously and this time they both dissolve into uncontrollable laughter. 

It’s true however, Dan thinks, that Phil won’t be able to recreate that small groan of subtle ecstasy building up to the opening of Toxic, even if the key to channeling it is the sounds Phil himself has just made in a yearning gravel-voiced baritone Dan won’t soon forget. Everything about Phil is genuine, true to his very nature so that even feigning a facsimile of an orgasm to sing a song runs counter to Phil’s best efforts, because there’s an element of falsity to it no matter how innocent that won’t allow him to follow through. It’s strange how lucid Phil’s personality actually is when Dan stops to reflect on it. They’ve exchanged their share of gentle teasing jibes and small arguments, but there has never been a moment when Dan could turn around and say that he mistrusted Phil. All of the secrets he’d ever confided carefully bottled away in a place he knows Phil will never dare to reveal and there’s a drowsy comfort to be had in that knowledge, to know Phil will never say any of the things he wants to keep hidden. It makes his affection for the man beside him overflow into a complicated mix of emotions he can’t quite define, but he feels it wrench at his chest with a visceral pull that leaves him breathless all over again and he thinks, ‘oh this is love, this is love.’

He lapses into a pensive silence, his throat too full of things he’s not sure how to give voice to and settles for looking at Phil, studying his face, the wide eyes which have gone green from the bed covers laid across them, the lips gone too shades a darker pink and lush from where he’s worried at them with his own mouth in prolonged kisses. He lifts a hand and slowly, playfully, walks his fingers down the bridge of Phil’s nose, tickling their way down to his chin and then up to the soft rounded curve of his left cheek. Phil bears this impromptu inspection without a word, merely smiling, eyes hooded and drowsy. Dan wonders what Phil would be like as a vampire, how those eyes might appear when black with hunger or tinged a sharper mix of complicated blue green imbued with predatory interest of the world. He can’t imagine Phil as a creature made of blood lust and dark cunning, but the idea of ‘what if’ nags at him and he thinks of them walking side by side in the night, the two of them holding sway over their small section of central London as friends and lovers and vampires. 

There’s a certain freedom in that promise, the both of them unfettered by time, unrestricted by weakness or fear, sharing an eternity together which they can weave to their whims however they pleased. They could leave, after a fashion, or shape a new meaning of their newfound existence and pursue their interests in other ways. Dan continues to muse, his fingers skating down the cool planes of Phil’s cheek, but he’s no longer playing at theoreticals. The idea of turning Phil intrigues him completely and he feels the weight of his fangs protrude against his bottom lip with a dangerous pressure in a twist of pavlovian response to smelling the blood tracing its way down venous paths at the throat under his wandering hand. This time when he imagines biting Phil it isn’t with the hypothetical intention of killing him, of stealing his warmth for his own, but bringing Phil with him instead, of pressing him down into the bed sheets, of listening to his heated cries and watching him contort against Dan’s embrace, of giving him the blood and making him a vampire too.

“I could do it to you,” Dan murmurs aloud as he traces Phil’s cheek in another circle, “I could bring you with me.”

“I am with you.” Phil frowns and then his face stills, eyes trained on Dan’s revealed fangs with equal parts fascination and dread.

“I mean truly with me….in me, in you…blood and blood.” Dan’s lips brush against Phil’s as he whispers his intent. The words seep out as separate weighted whispers in the dark, their proximity no longer just sensual, but tinged with the promise of danger. “Do you want that?”

Phil draws away and sits up with a startling rush of speed, his face critical and serious. “I don’t think you know what you’re saying.”

“Are you serious? Of course I know what I’m saying. I may not know exactly how to go about it, but if it’s anything like what happened to me then it’s not all that difficult to manage.” He struggles up to look at Phil, yanking his shirt down from where it’s bunched up into a thin collar of fabric at his neck. “Phil, you almost died tonight. And what we just shared right now-I’m not going to risk losing that again. Like this we’re at a disadvantage, but if you were with me, truly with me in this, we could get through it together. Just like you said before.”

“Dan, you only just managed to avoid biting me over a cut in my finger. What happens if you tried to turn me, like you said, right now and it all went wrong? What happens if you couldn’t stop? If you ended up killing me before you could do whatever it is that makes me a vampire?”

“I would never kill you. I’d never-”

“I know you wouldn’t, but the possibility is there and it’s greater than the possibility of surviving the attempt.”

Dan pauses to reflect and concedes with frustration that Phil is right. The blood thirst is too new, his transformation too unsteady and unrefined to trust himself to drain Phil as Yilmaz had done to him and not finish off every drop in Phil’s veins before he could stop. At the same time, Phil had only raised a flaw with the idea, but he hadn’t discredited it completely, a realization that would make his heart skip a beat in his chest if it could.

“So…you...would want that? To be with me like this?”

“Maybe,” Phil says quietly. “It’s not as if I’m not curious, but it’s a bit horrifying too. Seeing my family wih any regularity would be out of the question and eventually I’d have to come to terms watching them all go on without me. They're just as an important part of my life as you are. And then I don’t know that I’d make a good vampire- To have to drink blood even if it’s bought from the butcher’s and trying to secure the flat against surprise day inspections by the landlord-it’s a lot to think about. If it came down to it though…I would want to, but not just yet. I’d rather be human and alive rather than dying in a bad attempt at being turned. The whole idea behind us moving together was to not be alone and the last option stands a good chance of that happening to both of us.”

It’s a sobering thought that admonishes Dan’s fangs back to small sedate points in his gums and he plops back onto the pillows with a heavy thud.

“Sorry. I know, I know. I just-it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Phil edges back down to lay beside him, pulling the covers up over the both of them as he does.  
“It is. One day, maybe we can talk about it again. But not right now.”

“How do you know we’ll ever get the chance again?”

“You don’t know that we won’t. We moved here on a whim with too little money to really compensate the decision, but we made it.”

“We also weren't under the threat of having a group of elder vampires at our doorstep because I overstepped my boundaries. The more I think about this the more I wish I really could write this to write my way out of it. I keep forgetting how I’m supposed to get more blood tomorrow.”

“I could always order out for a pizza and you could eat the delivery person.”

“Right. Er-Maybe I’ll just stick to pork supplied for now.”

“Babe is going to be difficult to watch after all this.”

“You’ve eaten every one of his descendants in hotdogs and pizza toppings. Where’s your pang of conscience then?”

Phil closes his eyes, his head resting against Dan’s, completely at ease. “If you did write it, what would you call it? Your story I mean.”

“We’re back to that again? Dunno…The Urge, maybe? A one shot fic, by Dan Howell. With no Night Court, no complex decisions, just me and you drinking a tourist by the Shaftesbury Memorial at midnight after you turned me. Or maybe on the London Eye. That’s different. Like a new kind of mile high club, but with vampires. And biting people instead of sex.”

Silence answers him and he frowns. “Phil?”

When he looks over Phil is already drifted off and sleeping. He gives a scoffing sighs and slumps further into the mattress and the steady weight of Phil pressed up along his side. The not-smell is still there and Dan begins to think that perhaps Phil’s room has been suffused in it all along, embedded in the walls and the fabric of his clothes and he wonders if he smells the same, the way Phil’s cologne usually rubbed off on him throughout the day, the both of them trailing the essence of the other behind them.

His mouth and neck is still warm with the memory of Phil’s touch and he’s not ready to awaken tomorrow night and feel its absence. For now, he indulges in it and lets his body drift towards sleep. As usual his thoughts ravel off ahead of him, bringing new ideas and quiet worries that make any efforts at falling asleep with the same ease as Phil had done, difficult to manage. He thinks back to their trip to Jamaica and imagines a dark sky brimming with specks of light replacing the shadowed expanse of Phil’s ceiling. And he reflects on the magnitude of what it had been to realize what they were at that moment looking up, two humans out of a billion more on earth witnessing the last echoes of stars that had already died and he’d wondered if out there in the vastness of space if someone would one day look up and see their spot of light in the darkness and have the same idle thoughts. 

It’s incredible to him on reflection, not what he is now, but what he had always been, all of them, swirls of stardust, hydrogen bonds and atoms fused together inside a corporeal form, granted a time and place in which to act out their insecurities and hopes on the surface of a planet in only a tiny corner of what comprised the entire infinitude of space. And if he allows himself to dwell on it for too long he remains stunned with the implications of how tiny and numerous and magnificent they are, all of them, each of them, himself and Phil.

 _Nothing is ever so insignificant_ , he thinks, _no one is. We matter in the smallest and most crucial of ways. One star-a grain of sand- how does it go?_

As he turns his head to stare at Phil sleeping without concern or fear at his side, he’s not sure it matters at all if he gets the quote right, only that its significance is summed up neatly in Phil’s form, in the rumpled layers of his hair against the pillow, in the relaxed curve of his fingers lingering so close to Dan’s arm in the sheets, in the warm puffs of breath through his nose, all of it small mundane details imbued with significance because this is Phil. Because, Dan thinks, this is me looking at him and knowing it matters the most when it’s him.

Whatever comes after he’s committed to the idea of preserving this moment, of protecting them to the best of his ability against the threats already leveled their way and against any that might yet come. Not much on that front has changed. He had already devised plans for possible home invasions which Phil dreaded above all else and they had already faced and overcome the most staunch criticism of their own peers as their careers had elevated them to new plateaus of exposure and success. Dealing with vampires seemed easier by comparison.

He turns over on his side and closes his eyes, drifting off between the sounds of pattering rain and Phil's heartbeat and presently, before he's aware of it, he's drifted off into sleep, the same as the first night he'd returned home after being turned, only this time, he's surrounded by the living presence of someone he loves and whatever new dilemmas the next evening brings he will no longer have to face alone, but together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This is a tentative addition to the story as I was planning on leaving as it was without continuing, but the idea of it being unfinished bothers me, so I think I'll try my best to add to it as I can.  
> This is also posted a little later than I'd intended and probably would have been more detailed and involved if I didn't just want to get this chapter out before I ended up padding it more than I usually do. Since my online presence is sporadic enough as it is I've never actually thought to ask for a beta reader to filter this through first as it should be...)
> 
>    
> A few notes on the story:
> 
> -As of writing this I'll be getting tabinof tomorrow (or in a few hours technically) so I'm really looking forward to that. I've been dodging spoilers the entire time since it was released in the UK, but a friend sent me a forgiveable teaser in the form of a certain fanfiction which I included here as a sneaky reference, which is probably as subtle as a brick to the face.  
> (I was just going to read a paragraph or two and wait for the book to read the rest, but I was too interested and ended up reading the entire story in the end. It was great.)
> 
> -I embellished Dan's dialouge about living in Berkshire and walking his dog in the woods near his house. I remember coming across a post which alluded to him walking through a forest where J.R.R Tolkien recieved his inspiration for Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien was inspired by the English countryside at large, most notably in the Forest of Dean and not exclusively in Berkshire although the Berkshire Downs are mentioned as comprising a great deal of part of his layout for Middle earth. I just thought it was an interesting detail to use in the context of the story, especially with Dan's appreciation for nature and I decided to include it.


	7. Butterflies and Hurricanes

  


>   
>  _It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it._  
>  — Jean-Paul Sartre, 'Nausea'

At eleven years old it was about becoming a magician in primary to impress a girl named Charlotte whom he fancied.

Mystified by such phrases as ‘tonsil tennis’ and ‘special kisses’ that differed from regular ones, Phil had not yet fine-tuned the more subtle points of courtship so that his first attempts at attracting her favor through impromptu games of tag, in which he usually succeeded in pushing her over with misplaced enthusiasm, had not been entirely successful. Undiscouraged however, he’d decided if physical cues of rough and tumble play weren’t enough then the next best way to win the affections of a kindred spirit progressive enough to own a PlayStation and wear a Nintendo backpack could only be through incredible feats of skill, preferably a magic act. The idea had been inspired by a lazy Sunday afternoon spent enjoying the crunch of sweet cereal while watching a rerun of Blue Peter in which the magician Paul Kieve had succeeded in neatly sawing the presenter of the show into three sections without harm or consequence before reassembling her as Phil had looked on in wide-eyed amazement, a spoonful of dripping cereal frozen before his gaping mouth.

In bed that night his mind had bristled with visions of himself captivating theatres full of crowds the world over as he dazzled them with tricks that defied their belief and expectation. The obsession seized every waking thought until the day his mother had bought him a magician’s kit which he’d taken to practicing with relentlessly, imagining all the while as he fumbled through card tricks and tugged scarves from his sleeve, that with time and more finesse he might one day find himself on stage in front of thousands, dressed in a dazzling cape and top hat bedecked with silver sequins as he performed more dazzling feats before the audience, perhaps causing bowling balls to appear from thin air and pulling yards of white ribbon from his mouth or one upping Kieve’s trick to disappear volunteers into boxes before reappearing them in a burst of light and smoke to deafening applause.

His small classroom might not have been the Palladium stage and his skill nowhere near the caliber of what Kieve had demonstrated on television, but as soon as the idea of impressing Charlotte had entered his mind, Phil had contrived a plan. It was so clear. Completely infallible. He would amaze Charlotte with the tricks he was confident enough to show while garnering the attention of the entire class in the process. All his past social faux pas and shows of clumsiness would be forgotten instantly; his first embarrassing introduction into primary school with a brassy shock of orange tinted hair as the result of a bad dye job attempt at turning blonde would be instantly overlooked, replaced instead by their admiration for what they would see as his extraordinary talent. 

So it was that when the teacher questioned the class who might next want to volunteer for the following week’s show and tell Phil had seized the opportunity and shot his hand up into the air, arm straining with the effort as he envisioned the captivated looks on his classmate’s faces.

In hindsight, perhaps things hadn’t bode well from the start when instead of a cape of weighted shimmering fabric and glinting sequins his mother had procured a simple mockup in the form of a repurposed black bin liner decorated with cut out paper stars. At the time however, with the keen precocity of a child’s imagination, he had only marveled at it, ready to take on the role of a renowned illusionist with an arsenal of tricks sure to enchant the one girl in the room whose approval he sought the most.

The day arrived and he’d bounded to the front of the classroom dressed in full magician’s kit with the thin plastic of his cape crackling behind him as he took up position just to the right of Charlotte’s desk to allow her the best possible view. He only had a spare few minutes to showcase his performance before show and tell finished and the regular lesson plan resumed. With this in mind, Phil had accordingly planned his repertoire to be quick, but impressive. His opening act of a rubber band jumping from one side of his hand to the other with a quick snap and wiggle of his fingers, although simple enough in execution, had elicited rippling murmurs of mystified approval around the room. Charlotte in particular had been rapt, leaning forward in her seat to better see the next trick and in a flutter of excitement, sure that his plan was working, Phil had announced his next act of the levitating handkerchief with a fanfare of mystery and suspense.

The trick itself had been straight forward enough in theory. A bouncing rubber ball concealed by a handkerchief secured with needle and thread would, on dropping to the floor, give the illusion of floating and returning to Phil as he waved his hands over it with dramatic gestures. The prop had been carefully prepared by his mother the day before, but somewhere between arriving to school and setting up in front of the class the needle had slipped the stitch causing the handkerchief to fall away. Improvising a quick distraction he’d kneeled behind the teacher’s desk and frantically tried to push the needle back through the tough rubber hide of the ball, face a scrunched up mottled red with his effort, urging the needle under his breath to just, ‘come on come on,’ until, through the pressure of nerves, sweaty hands and knowing his allotted time was ticking away under the teacher’s skeptical stare, the needle skidded past its target and plunged straight into his palm.

Pain, immediate and fierce, had bolted up his arm like scalding water, but he’d bit back the agonized yell bubbling in his throat, yanked the needle away and binned the act altogether in lieu of saving face by calling Charlotte to the front as an assistant for his next prepared card trick. She’d accepted the offer willingly and stood in front of him with a shy smile and an expectant air as she waited to see what next marvel he might reveal.  
Pain still coursed through his hand and unsteadied his grip as he shuffled the pack of cards, but with Charlotte’s trust urging him on and the entire class waiting to be further impressed, he’d steeled himself to continue. His eyes had locked with hers and he’d returned her smile with a watery one of his own past the dull throb of his fingers, nerves aflutter with her presence in front of him, until he’d extended the deck out for her to choose any card of her liking and noticed the small dot where the needle had pierced his palm had erupted into a thick rill of blood spilling over his hand and down his wrist.

He couldn’t remember passing out but he did remember coming to on the floor, the side of his face where he’d collided with the tiles numb with pain to match the throb in his hand before rolling over groggily to see his teacher Mrs. Brown looming over him with Charlotte peering from behind her, this time wide-eyed and rapt with what he could only assume was horror.

“My goodness. You will never be a wizard, Philip,” Mrs. Brown had said, wryly amused and unaware of how the proclamation stung Phil’s pride worse than the pain in his face and his hand.

It wasn’t about being a wizard anyway, he’d thought at the time. It had been about becoming a magician, achieving talent through his own effort, making Charlotte see all the potential he really had. Now he was left with a failed performance, burning cheeks and the teacher’s remark ringing in his ears during the long walk down the hallway to the nurse’s office.

Later, while watching the show Bernard’s Watch, he’d wished he too could have possessed the power to stop time and fix the floating handkerchief act without injury to palm or pride or perhaps stall time long enough to learn more impressive tricks, but he wasn’t sure even if he managed to one day magically transform a person into a bizarre animal hybrid if that would have been enough to persuade her when his classmate Nick happened along with the news that he’d just received a Nintendo 64, a revelation that left Phil himself quietly envious and in the end proved to be the lynchpin for Charlotte’s affections.

At eleven years old, with a plaster on his hand and a bag of ice pressed to his cheek, he’d decided perhaps it wasn’t about becoming a magician after all.

At twelve years old it was about becoming one of The Boys in an attempt to be cool with a ‘K’ to drive the point home.  
True to their namesake The Boys were a group of boys that milled about the neighborhood in gold plated chains, hooded track suits and high top trainers, trailing salvos of laughter behind them as if the world were a bawdy inside joke and only they were in on it. Phil shared little in common with The Boys who most often traded loud arguments over football matches and jeered at anyone whose fashion sense wasn’t in line with the Adidas or Schott labeled brands they preferred, but they had an undeniable allure in their gruff self-assured manner and Phil had determined he wanted to try and be part of their number, unimaginative sobriquet aside.

Here was an opportunity to prove himself and join in the ranks of the initiated and the cool. He could almost see the envious looks of other boys in his class who hadn’t made the cut, could already see the girls timidly asking him to recount how he’d become a member as they all crowded round closer for a better look. If he was the most unassuming person that might ever likely join The Boys then all the more reason to try he’d thought, to make it clear that he was more than anyone’s underestimations, especially his own.

Asking to join had required a bit of cunning enterprise to convince them he was worthy enough to even consider as they eyed him disdainfully from under baseball caps purposefully skewed on their heads. He’d understood at a glance, for them, his merits as a person were secondary. He needed to provide something they could capitalize on and he was sure offering to rebrand their group with a title that wasn’t redundant wouldn’t be well received. His father’s executive role in a production company had provided useful leverage when he assured them that if made a member he’d be able to arrange a meeting with S Club 7’s Rachel Stevens, but for all that they discussed their attractions to tall blonde fit types that were ‘fly’ beyond words, they’d merely dismissed the offer with a disinterested scoffing remark. Before they could turn him away completely however, Phil had recovered with another proposal. If a meeting with Rachel Stevens couldn’t impress them then perhaps an official headquarters in the form of his parent’s garden shed where they could convene in private amongst themselves, away from the view of meddlers or busybodies, might be more persuasive in gaining their favor.

This time he’d been met with mutters of approval and for a week his shed became occupied by The Boys instead of garden tools while Phil found himself barred from entering it until he had passed the group’s chosen rites of initiation.

As he’d made the offer Phil hadn’t considered being forbidden from entering a shed on his family’s property at the behest of strangers borrowing it under the pretense of superiority was a somewhat foul bargain. The promise of making the cut into their group overruled reason. Here was a chance at redemption from being just the strange wizard boy with a tendency towards gawky and awkward. He could prove he was good enough to be on par with the exclusive edgy vibe The Boys exuded. All he had to do was pass their tests, the first phase of which turned out easier than he’d imagined when they demanded he knock on one of his neighbor’s doors and take off before someone could answer to see who it was. It had been a fairly harmless request compared to all the other scenarios racing around his head along the lines of sordid hazing rituals used in clandestine university societies, but perhaps an elite intellectual club like Skull and Bones just had a different screening process for its applicants than a group of boys in secondary dressed in knockoff sportswear that smelled of beer and cigarettes.

He’d completed the first phase easily enough, cheating only a little when he’d told his aunt beforehand that he would be knocking on her door and if she might not mind as it was all part of a game. The second phase however had called on every bit of courage at his disposal when told he must ride his bicycle down a hill so steep it was nearly one perfect vertical drop before leveling out again many feet below.  
Heights weren’t a problem when viewed from the relative safety of a rollercoaster with mechanical brakes and a safety harness fastened around his waist, but with nothing more than his wits to rely on while at the mercy of a simple metal frame and terminal velocity, the idea had been terrifying.

On the appointed day, perched at the apex of a hill that might as well have been Mount Everest, he’d grabbed the handlebars, gritted his teeth and let up on the pedals, the wind buffeting the hair back from his forehead as the downshift of gravity plummeted both the bike and his stomach at increasing speed. The urge to halt his progress by digging his feet into the ground had been overwhelming, but the urge to succeed at the trial had been stronger, overriding every ingrained instinct of self-preservation.

_Nearly there_ , he’d thought, _nearly there_ , a halfhearted stroke of optimism which couldn’t subdue the roiling surge of nausea biting the back of his throat at feeling the bike careen its way over hard asphalt that would do more than graze his face this time if he fell. Before he was quite aware of it, he’d reached the bottom of the hill without falling off and as the wheels coasted to a stop The Boys had surrounded him with much approval and claps on the back while he stumbled off the bike on shaky legs, unwilling to admit he’d kept his eyes closed the entire way down.

The third and last phase of his initiation had not involved pranks or death defying feats yet when one more outspoken member of The Boys, Kyle, announced that he would have to smoke like one of The Boys to become one of The Boys, Phil’s heart had skipped a beat as if he’d just been asked to hotwire a car and ram-raid a pet shop.

From the earliest he could remember, on watching his grandmother smoke and being unsure if the wispy tendrils she exhaled came from a bonfire raging somewhere within her body like a living wicker man, he’d quickly come to the conclusion that cigarettes smelled horrible and looked dodgy, if not scary. Appearances aside, he knew if his parents ever found out he’d been smoking, the consequences would be far more serious than any initiation gauntlet he might endure. 

At the look of hesitation on Phil’s face and most likely fearing the loss of their newly gained headquarters, Kyle had assured Phil that cigarettes were perfectly alright, as a matter of fact, celebrities smoked them all the time with the express purpose of appearing more attractive. That was why every gritty action film featured leads with cigarettes clenched in their teeth, why ‘yippee ki-yay motherfucker’ was a more effective line when delivered between the exhale of a lit Gauloise and why an actress’s beauty was compounded tenfold merely by virtue of the cigarette in her hand. Also, Kyle had gone on to say with the conspiratorial smile of someone about to impart a crucial trade secret, cigarettes had a special property that would attract women in droves.

This last comment had given Phil pause and before he could spend time analyzing the fallacies in the argument to ask why then weren’t The Boys surrounded by a harem or how could tobacco possibly be considered a pheromone, he’d agreed to the terms in a rush and the next day he’d followed the group into the shed, eyes fixed on Kyle’s back pocket where the top half of a box of Mayfairs peeked out, clearly the inaugural cigarettes meant for Phil to smoke and finally join The Boys.

He’d vacillated there in the dim light breaking through the small window and wooden slats of the shed, surrounded by boys taller and older than he was, a leering convocation of giants with faces partially shrouded by the hoods of their jackets stretched taut around the bill of their baseball caps, as he wondered if he should do this at all, if in the end magical pheromones and joining The Boys was truly worth all the trouble.  
Kyle had stood before him with the thin barrel of the filter extended out and the other end burning with an acrid stench that prickled his eyes.  
Tendrils of smoke twisted about the air in patterns like distressed snakes while the rest of the group crowded further in, corralling him towards the cigarette with an accompanying chorus of ‘take it, man, go on then, take it,’ as Phil had looked on with growing alarm and disbelief that this was happening at all, that he was about to smoke for the first time. He wondered what it would taste like, if the smoke would burn his throat and choke his lungs or if it might be just like balancing on a bike down a steep hill where the experience would be over faster than he imagined and he’d never have to revisit it again, cigarette induced sex appeal be damned.

His hand had shook as he’d reached up, just as unsteady as it had been during his failed card trick with Charlotte, all eyes fixed on him just as before, waiting for him to commit and show his worth. 

_I don’t want to do this, but I have to, I must, but I don’t want to. Do I really have to? I don’t-I can’t-_

“Take it then. You’re nearly one of the boys now, Phil.”

One member of the hooded assembly had spoken up and interrupted the run on train of his thoughts to remind him he was only one more phase away from full induction. Just one quick drag, a simple exhale and he would be in.

His fingers brushed the filter, Kyle’s grin loomed in front of him, the smell of burning tobacco closed his throat and for a moment time plodded to a standstill as if the world had paused to see what decision he might take there in the muted shadows of the garden shed.

Then, before pressure or nerves could sway his choice, the door to the shed had been yanked wide and light flooded through in a blinding explosion, freezing the group where they stood in a stunned tableau, Phil’s hand still outstretched to accept the cigarette Kyle proffered like a strange parody of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.  
At first, he hadn’t been sure who was responsible for the interruption until he’d turned and squinted past the glare of the sun to make out the overcast silhouette of his mother’s figure stood gravely silent in the doorway, called to the scene by the preternatural intuition all mothers seemed to possess when their children were embroiled in troublesome situations. She hadn’t said a word, but her thin lipped stare of disappointment was enough to make his outstretched hand drop at once to his side. A withering glance at each member of the group had in turn been enough to disband The Boys without protest as they quickly filed past to leave the garden with the silent understanding that their impromptu lease of Phil’s shed had been terminated.

At twelve years old, after being grounded and retiring to his room with no small measure of relief, he’d decided maybe it wasn’t about joining The Boys after all.

At fourteen years old it was about having the chat username ‘snowdude’ in a play at pretending he was one of the many snowboarders who frequented the ski slope he lived next to, as if by virtue of proximity he might become just as adroit at performing tricks of straight airs and grabs. But after considering his limited knowledge of the terminology let alone his natural aptitude for clumsiness and facing the unamused dismissal of a user who found it ridiculous that a professed snowboarder might own a hamster, he’d decided perhaps it wasn’t about becoming a snowboarder either.

In his final year of secondary it was about becoming a veterinarian, remembering the helpless instance when at six he’d come upon a moribund rabbit in a field and in a panic of not knowing what else to do and loathe to leave it alone, had scooped it up in his arms before racing home to deposit its limp mass squarely in the middle of his parent’s bed where his mother had found it bleeding out onto the bedcovers. It was the first time he’d ever heard his mother call out his full name in a strident voice that resonated throughout the house and the first time the suggestion of caring for animals professionally had planted itself in the back of his mind. However, after taking work experience at a veterinarian’s office and watching a dog with oral cancer undergo surgical removal of its jaw, the crunching snap of the saw and the collection of bloody fluid in the pan under the dog’s head had proven too raw of a sensory experience for him to withstand. In one moment the room had been filled with the sounds of serrated metal teeth scraping against bone and the next he’d fainted dead away.

Later, after recovering in the back office while clutching a cup filled with water to drink as he weighed the merits of pursuing a degree in linguistics instead, he’d decided perhaps it also wasn’t about becoming a veterinarian.

The months had passed and secondary segued into college where both his teachers and his parents bore down with the repeated suggestion that with university looming on the horizon he must now decide what he wanted to do with his life, but the anxious realization had quickly set in that he had no idea what he wanted to do. The world was large and varied, full of opportunities that teased at his ambitions pulling him first one way then the other. Trips to Prague, London and Manchester showed him vibrant cities teeming with people and stories he wanted to be a part of. He would find himself daydreaming between classes, restless with the need to break out of claustrophobic expectations and spaces to do as he pleased, urged along by a yearning that as of yet had no name. It had only been a vague need to make something more viable from the fanciful worlds and creatures he doodled between the margins of his school notes.  
He couldn’t imagine a place for himself in the guise of office employee or menial labour. The small retail job he’d taken in an effort to placate the gentle demands of his parents had sapped all his creative energies his first day on the clock. The dull monotony of stocking shelves and trudging along the aisles under garish fluorescent lighting whittled away at his endurance until the breaking point of a disgruntled customer tossing a chocolate orange at his head drained any remaining patience he had for ever again pulling a nine to five doing flunkie work behind a cash register. After that he’d quickly resolved to find a way to make a career around his ambitions, so he wouldn’t wake up twenty years later whiling away the hours in department stores or office cubicles wondering where all the time had gone and whether or not he might ever catch up to all the things he’d wanted to do or be.

It was only halfway through university, upon finding like-minded friends who shared the same passion for film as he did, for visualizing narratives, discussing theories and filming short summaries about the interesting vagaries of their lives, that he’d decided he finally knew what it was about. Maybe it wasn’t about trying to keep pace with the expectations of other people or adopting attitudes and behaviors for the convenience of fitting in. Maybe it was about pursuing his own eccentricities, letting his personality breathe without stifling it under hesitation or reticence and gently demanding people accept him as he was, with his strangeness and enthusiasm for the world and all its varied imaginative potential in tow.

Maybe it was about being Phil Lester and creating his own version of the world through the lens of a camera and inviting others to see through his eyes for a change.  
Once he’d dug in his heels, a few naysayers had appeared, one of them in the form of Anne Robinson’s spectacled glower when he’d taken a chance to compete on the game show The Weakest Link. At the time he hadn’t been sure what impulsive streak had possessed him to willingly subject himself to Anne’s excoriating scrutiny, but he’d found himself answering each challenge of his character with quick-fire resolve until, before an audience of thousands, he’d breezily rejected his linguistics degree in favor of pursuing a career as a director instead. Later, after leaving the game show as the one of the last two contestants standing, instead of ‘at the bottom of the pile’ as Anne had suggested he might be, a fierce sense of accomplishment had seized him despite having lost the last round. He knew what he wanted to do and this time there would be no second guessing himself.

“Whoever heard of a film director from Rawtenstall?”

One of his friends had playfully nudged him in the arm during a house party between rounds of jagerbombs when the conversation had turned towards what Phil would like to do once he left York.

“Ridley Scott came from South Shields. That’s close enough.”

“Yeah, but if he comes out with a bad film no critic will ever write him up as the ‘rotten’ director from Rawtenstall. You’re looking at a mine field of journalistic puns.”

Phil had laughed along and shrugged. “It’s a risk I’ll have to take I guess.”

“I never knew you were that invested in it.”

“Why not?”

“Dunno. Knew some people that got involved with the arts, but only as a hobby, never as a career. The money doesn’t exactly flow when you’re a beginner, sometimes not even when you’re a veteran of the field. I saw the most hardcore enthusiasts cry off when the paycheck was hardly enough to cover a packet of hobnobs at Tesco’s. And anyway, it’s just hard to think of the guy with a board game always at the ready in the common room opening a premiere of his film at Cannes. It’s different to think of you in a setting like that.”

“It’s different because he’s hashing together parodies of sitcoms and horror movies on the internet where everyone and their dog uploads a video about everyone else and their dogs.” Another friend had sidled up to add his opinion in the conversation with a heavy clamp of his hand on Phil’s shoulder. “His knighted self, Sir Ridley, worked on set designs and television programmes for the BBC straight out of uni. That’s leagues away from a handheld camera in your room, mate. It’s one thing to mess about for laughs, but when it’s a career you have to start thinking like a proper adult.”

“What’s a ‘proper adult?’ ” Phil had made a face. “And how many proper adults with degrees end up working the till at Asda’s anyway? I don’t want to do something for the rest of my life that I can’t have fun with.”

“I’m not saying you can’t, but you’re just playing a numbers game right now. Might as well buy a funny hat and place a bet at the Royal Ascot. You can’t expect to make a decent living off of that. You have to get serious.”

“I am serious. It’s what I want to do.” His reply had been swift and without reservation.

Phil was sure his face had remained neutral throughout, but perhaps the weight of his stare had been too intense, too full of single minded conviction, because the friend who had offered a lighthearted cynical take on his YouTube beginnings quickly looked away from him with a flustered mutter of, ‘alright,’ before downing a shot of beer and Jägermeister in one go and nearly choking on it.

It wasn’t that he derived pleasure in being contrarian or proving people wrong, but Phil thought there was an undeniable satisfaction in being told, ‘you can’t do that,’ and going ahead to do it anyway, culminating to the point when he’d watched Lost and felt an instant kinship towards Locke’s consistent refrain of, ‘don’t tell me what I can’t do.” In many instances it made life more interesting, so much in fact that he soon developed a habit of pursuing every idea and idle desire until his own experience dictated whether his ventures were salient or terrible. He had later concluded that no strict rules existed for how to approach life save for the most obvious ones built on empathy and common sense. The rest was a loose policy that helped to ensure personal comfort and allow for reasonable risk, especially when those risks hinted at positive outcomes. 

Be brave, he’d thought and whatever followed- success, acknowledgement, pleasure and contentment- would come about as byproducts of bottling up his fear and forging ahead with what mattered.

However, sitting bolt upright in bed at two in the morning, his room still darkened by an overcast sky stuck between the late evening and the early dawn, he’s suddenly no longer sure if it really was about being himself anymore or if being brave, being simply Phil Lester, was any longer enough to suffice.

It’s a nervous realization frustrating all attempts at sleep as he stares up wide-eyed at the ceiling, startled awake this time not by his neighbor’s dog voicing a late evening protest or by a symphony of jackhammers and drills accompanying early morning renovations, but by an electric jolt of fear winding its way down his spine, innervating every muscle with a vague tingle of alarm that involuntarily clenches his hands into fist at his sides.

_Something is missing._

It’s his first thought on waking and he tries to understand why the idea had occurred to him in the first place.  
The silence in the house is disquieting, too heavy and perfect, like every long car ride with unendurable silences he was impatient to break, instilling him with more unease, but as he concentrates past the quiet, presently, other sounds introduce themselves. Drops of rain tossed against the side of the house by hollow gusts of wind sweeping around the eaves, the occasional metallic plink of water dripping from the kitchen faucet, the sibilant hiss of car tires passing over rain drenched streets, the hushed scuffling tread of pedestrians finding their way home late at night- all the mundane atmospheric warble which inundated most apartments in London signifying that all was normal in the world, all was as it should be and yet the thought continues to nag at him.

_Something is missing. Something vital, something that was always there and now is not._

His gaze travels slowly around the room. Trails of rain on the window cast their shadows along the walls in a natural camera obscura effect he might otherwise think beautiful, but there’s a tenuous gravity to the moment, a nervous sense of confusion tensing every muscle; magnifying everything to a point of urgency as loud as an alarm clock buzzing in his ear, shrill and terrible. In the inconstant dark of his room, the shadows lengthen and creep over the walls, morphing furniture and discarded shipping boxes into monstrous shapes that with some unwelcome encouragement from his imagination appear more insidious than they actually are.  
One misshapen hulking silhouette in the corner by his door assumes the appearance of a suited man with an obscured face wearing a brimmed hat on his head.  
A few more seconds of staring and he’s nearly convinced himself the demon Der Kindestod itself has stepped right out of the Buffy universe to lurk by his door waiting for the right moment to creep up and steal his life force with its ragged claws and proboscis eyes.

 _That’s ridiculous_ , he thinks even as he continues to stare unblinking at the amorphous shape. _It went after children not adults. Although it did kill that doctor in the episode without a problem, but I don’t have a fever so I couldn’t possibly see it even if it was there. Which…isn’t that reassuring now that I think about it. Anyway, it’s not real. It’s just a shadow. It’s not anything else but that._

The silhouette continues to look like a person despite his best efforts at convincing his mind otherwise and with some effort he forces himself to look away towards the far wall instead where the dim glow of streetlamps outside provides some reassuring illumination to the angles of his closet and bureau. He quickly notes all is in its proper place. His books and comics neatly lined in their shelves, figurines and board games tucked away into their respective spaces, his clothing arranged in colorful rows on their hangers, but despite the familiar normalcy of his own belongings the sense of misplacement grows and festers.

_Missing. Something’s missing. What’s missing? Button, button, who’s got the button? My money’s on…_

The errant thought trails off and his head turns and catches the dark enigmatic stare of the wild thing peering down at him from its poster on the wall. His friend Wirrow had painted the shaggy haired creature into a lively, dynamic composition that Phil had thought vibrant and beautiful at the time when he’d finished tacking it to the wall, an imaginative monster of dark benevolence from the altered dreamscapes Wirrow usually created. The encroaching shadows however conspire with his anxious thoughts to throw the piece into stark monochromatic relief and suddenly there’s nothing darkly whimsical about it at all anymore. In the moment it seems more like a threat, a wide eyed leering creature with penumbral eyes that had resembled Dan’s when he’d regarded Phil with an intent of raw hunger and sidling cunning.

At the unsettling comparison any lingering scraps of fatigue tear away as the last few hours resurge into his head with a flash bulb flicker of images and sensations: the train ride home, confronting Dan in the kitchen, the vampire in the alleyway, the near miss of fangs in his throat, the tense walk back home in the rain, Dan’s ensuing revelations and the new discoveries and renewed affections it had brought in its wake.

On the heels of remembering, he thinks in a rush, _Dan. Where is Dan?_

A scenario plays out in his mind of the vampire in the alleyway returning, foregoing his threat to consult the court of his superiors, to stalk the darkness of the room and seize Dan with the intent to return later and finish the score with Phil.

Alarm shifts to blind panic and he turns over in a rush to grab the bulk of bedcovers next to him, snatching them off and away in a furl of bright blue and for an instant he’d been the wizard boy of his primary school again, fumbling through a reappearing act gone wrong in which only bare space and a cold pillow would be revealed instead of the person who only some time before had lay there. His hands fix into rigid hooks, stress clenches his jaw with teeth grinding force and later he would think there was nothing like the threat of loss, the danger of a loved one’s permanent absence, to jumpstart affection into a frenzy so that Phil imagined it would always be difficult to not wake up in the middle of the night and go to check on Dan, to see that he was alive and present in their house

He can only stare for a moment as the sheets give way to show a bedraggled fringe of brown hair and the pale naked torso of Dan resting sedately at his side, eyes closed, mouth lax and calm, unaware of Phil looking down at him with a fixed blank expression. He’d been so convinced he would find nothing when the sheets pulled back that for an instant Dan’s presence seems more like a mirage invented by heavy optimism, but he is there, real and vivid, the weight of his body clearly indenting the fitted sheet covering the mattress and wrinkling the pillow under his head. He’s stretched out in a position that reminds Phil of an article he’d read once alluding to the sleeping lion posture in Buddhism, a description he’d thought oddly specific and strange at the time. He’d never seen a lion lay down in such a manner before, in such a distinctly human and delicate way, with the left arm resting outstretched against the flank of its left side and a right paw curled under its chin, but Dan mirrors the pose exactly with unwitting accuracy. He’s lost in profound sleep, unaware of allusions to lions or troubled thoughts and Phil slumps in relief against the headboard.

 _He’s fine. Everything is fine_ , he thinks. Yet, the disquieting sensation persists.

_Something is missing._

Silence again. The deafening racket of the pulse in his ears, of his own breath settling down from ragged to calm and then Phil realizes.

Dan isn’t breathing.

Panic, visceral and sharp, spikes through his head the same way it had the first time he’d been unsure whether Dan was breathing or not, before Phil had known the truth of everything that had happened in his absence. Even with the knowledge of the past few hours fresh in his mind, his heart contracts in the center of his chest and he flails across the bed to grip Dan’s exposed left arm on an impulsive reflex to assure himself that the previous day’s impossible revelations had not just been the product of wishful thinking and an overactive imagination.

He’d expected Dan to wake immediately with the rough grip clawing at his elbow, but Dan’s limbs remain slack and leaden in a way that makes Phil think perhaps there was something to be said for the phrase, ‘sleeping like the dead.’

_But I suppose it doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re undead._

Undead. It’s a term he still hasn’t managed to assimilate, one his tired brain hardly dares to believe in the dark uncertainty of the shadows gathered in his room, not when Dan remains inert next to him, his skin a cold stone under Phil’s palm, every pore radiating a numbing chill as if he’d just tumbled in from a frigid winter outing.

 _No, it’s colder than even that_ , Phil thinks, like the point where frostbite would set in.

The pulse in Phil’s throat ratchets up to a chaotic riot, but on closer inspection he notices the nail beds of Dan’s fingers, although a strange translucent white, remain unblemished by any hallmark of cyanosis or ischemia which would herald frostbite and his skin is pliant, not like stone at all, yielding easily to Phil’s touch.  
When he bears down on Dan’s wrist, suddenly, under the pressure of his fingertips, he feels it- the too slow, barely there, but discernible pulse of a heartbeat no longer defined by a normal human rhythm. It’s like the hollow tock of a deer scare, taking its time to fill with blood and pulsing only when it was full to filter the blood back out through the veins. It’s fascinating and Phil lingers with his hand around Dan’s wrist, measuring each drum of heartbeat under the skin. If he had learned how to read a radial pulse he would have done so at that moment if only to occupy himself with something other than the cadaveric temperature of Dan’s skin denying the vitality he can feel throbbing under his thumb and forefinger. His fingers press down further until the only pulse he’s able to feel is his own, a frenetic canter eclipsing the intermittent blip of Dan’s heart.

When he reluctantly lets go, the deep welled impressions of his fingers and nails remain in Dan’s arm minutes after. More minutes pass before Dan’s chest hitches in a shallow heave and fall to signify he’d taken a breath. It seems an eternity later that Dan takes another breath and by that time Phil is gasping for air as his body unconsciously tries to find synchrony with Dan’s abnormal rhythm.

_It happened. It was all real. Of course, it was. I don’t think I could invent something that strange and vivid outside of a dream, but still-_

But still a sense of urgency remains, the nagging sensation of missing something else, something crucial and this time he understands it’s nothing to do with his room or with Dan, but with him, rather with his own lack of comprehension in a situation where he falters to understand his place or how to help in any viable way that would make a difference. Linguistics and media studies had never covered how to approach the kind of life experience he now faced and no amount of Buffy marathons could have ever prepared him to face the supernatural when it was suddenly real and not part of a script enacted on a sound stage. Not even the odd little book on becoming a witch he’d once received from a relative as a gift had covered any of the basics of how to approach the problem of a vampire court that might now be focusing on their mutual ruin. There’s too much threatening to overwhelm him with a slew of ‘what if’s’ he can’t answer.

Dan had been right, he thinks, there was too much to consider and he’s only now aware of the precious few hours that remained to them before the next evening arrived complete with all the things with fangs that went bump in the night.

_No time, no time._

An old familiar voice intrudes. It’s the old man on the train again, the long tunnel in his dream with its obscure threat hidden somewhere in the darkness of everything he doesn’t know and this time there’s no waking up from a reality more convoluted and strange than anything he’s ever faced before. It’s the culmination of every bad day, worse than the time he’d woken up crying from a nightmare, stepped out of bed only to step on a tack and later crossed his university campus to be greeted by the suppurating remains of an owl on the pavement in front of him like a deliberately placed ill omen blocking his path. Bad days at least were transient, soon to be replaced by better ones, but what of awful feelings that crept and lingered at the back of his thoughts despite his best efforts to forget them, grating at his endurance with an intensity worse than any migraine he’d ever suffered?

The calm in his room, the steady drip of rain against the glass and the welcome presence of Dan sleeping at his side is a fragile peace that will soon be broken. He knows as soon as the rain stops and the brief reprieve of daylight filters away, they’ll both face a freefall back into the unknown, none the wiser for what to do when a threat greater than the anonymous vampire in the alley rose to find them.

“You’re freaking out,” Dan might have told him if he was awake, the way he most often did when he observed Phil fretting and pacing the hallway between agonizing over potentially missing a cab or mislaying his passport before finding it in the bin where Dan had accidentally thrown it out. Usually, he’d deny the accusation, but this time Phil isn’t sure Dan would be entirely wrong. He wasn’t fond of overthinking situations, especially when thinking about it only magnified a problem into a disproportionate jumble of complexities until it became more convoluted than it initially was. Now, however, thinking about it is the only thing he can do despite admonishing himself not to and he can almost empathize with Dan’s penchant for working out a problem by ‘walking it out’ along the borders of his room in a circuitous route of creaking floorboards that Phil had long since memorized like an old dance routine.  
He’s tempted to do the same, if only to do something more productive than lay in bed brooding, to at least recreate the illusion of forward progressive motion when all else seemed at a standstill, but he’s too aware of the late hour and his neighbor sleeping in the flat below theirs to recreate Dan’s pacing method, unsure that even if he walked himself ragged around the entirety of the flat he might ever arrive at a reassuring conclusion.

He’d tried to fall back asleep at first and force aside all the worst case scenarios vying for precedence in his thoughts, reaching instead for the sensation of the languorous afterglow proceeding his and Dan’s exchange of heated kisses and fervent touches. It had been enough at the time to lull him into a state of drowsy contentment like a cat glutted with cream so that even before he knew it, as Dan had continued speaking to him, quite without meaning to, he’d nodded off. Little more than two hours have passed since then, but it’s a sensory memory too overwhelmed by his nerves frayed to a threadbare edge of worry for it to be of any real use at cajoling him back to sleep. He’s left hovering on the verge of drifting off, eyes fluttering closed only to find himself minutes later staring up wide-eyed at the ceiling again, his mind seemingly on autopilot as it once more goes over the events of the last few hours.

It’s still incredible to him on hindsight that they were both alive at all, that they had managed to survive an encounter with a living myth to later return home amidst confessions and revelations that still made his head spin, not the least of which included the magnitude of Dan’s displayed affections.

He had told Dan they could meet the conflict together and his conviction hasn’t changed, but now the adrenaline of discovery was over and the warmth of intimacy had been spent, he isn’t sure pretty assurances were enough to face whatever was to come next. Tackling problems required patience, motivation and no shortage of effort to surmount, but what were all those things when he was nonplussed for how to apply them in a situation that escaped all comprehension? What was patience anyway to creatures that had an eternity to bide; what was motivation when they were possessed of centuries’ worth of cunning and power to rival any plan he might enact to protect them both? His narrow escape in the alley had been a stroke of good luck contingent on Dan’s presence. Left on his own, he wasn’t sure there would have been an outcome with him currently sitting in his room, safe and sound, not when the vampire had put him under thrall, easily holding him in check with a drowsy compliance he shudders to remember. 

_Even if I could have defended myself_ , he thinks, _would it have really helped?_

He remembers how the vampire had thrown Dan into the wall as if he were a doll, as if it meant nothing to pick up someone well over six foot tall and toss them with little exertion to show for the effort. Dan, with his newly acquired strengths and resiliency had escaped with little more than a gash on his forehead, but for anyone else, Phil knew the blow would have been fatal.

He imagines an alternate scenario in which he was a more trained athletic version of himself with muscles to match Chris Hemsworth’s physique in Thor or with the combative prowess of Beatrix Kiddo to face down any physical threat with calculated daring and confidence, but even then he wonders if any regimen of martial arts or ab crunches would be enough to confront the impossible when it presented itself with blood lust, fangs and immeasurable strength.

In the end he was merely human, only Phil from Rossendale, with degrees and talents better suited to cutting footage together to form narratives on film far removed from the duress and dangers of a life that has suddenly changed to accommodate circumstances of a magnitude he’d never imagined before.

In the wake of unanswered questions and the sudden awareness of his mortality on full display, any attempts at falling back to sleep prove impossible and he gives up the idea altogether.

 _Have a glass of warm milk, eat a snack, take a shower-_ His mother’s advice for sleepless nights comes to mind and he wonders if in her list of motherly axioms she might also have one for dealing with vampires or what to do when you were human and your best friend was suddenly not.  
As he thinks of her, it occurs to him that skirting the issue of Dan’s new nocturnal lifestyle or explaining his lack of enthusiasm for the plate of small cakes Phil’s parents usually brought when they visited would now be difficult. In a scenario where he could easily reveal the truth to his mother, it’s not difficult for Phil to imagine her greeting Dan with the same unwavering kindness, with the only concern that Phil was safe, happy and well. It’s a fanciful idea, a convenient daydream to suppose she would understand in the face of such bizarre and life altering news, but if she had been able to weather a time when Phil had written about homicidal house rabbits and once needed lions on the television and blindfolds in order to eat then he supposed by comparison the idea of vampires would be nothing quite as strange to her.

He looks over at his phone on the bed stand and has an urge to call her, just to hear her voice as a small means of reassurance now when he needs it most, but it’s too early in the morning and he doesn’t want to worry her. He has no idea what he would say besides or what exactly it is he wants to hear. It’s like his first day of uni all over again, watching his parents walk back cross the campus to their car and battling the urge to join them for dinner in an effort to delay the eventual moment when he would have to face being a freshman on his own devices; to deal with living in a dorm with other people and not the bedroom in his parent’s house; to finally understand what it meant to be an adult and figure things out for himself even though his heart had wedged itself in his throat at the idea of being truly on his own.

It had been like ripping off a plaster in one go, just to get the moment over and done with, a painful but necessary task like forcing himself to turn around and walk back to his dorm alone while resolving to just get on with it rather than dwell on the receding figures of his parents as they drove away.

He remembered the moment as a child arriving at his first day of school and watching his older brother walk away from him into the crowd, leaving him to navigate the halls and throngs of students on his own, with just his brother’s advice for support that the only way he could reasonably manage to survive school was if he did it alone, through force of will and self-reliance. At the time, unsure of what to do and sporting a head of hair dyed an incongruous shade of copper which attracted the stare of every student he passed as if he were a lighthouse beacon, he couldn’t find the means to take his brother’s advice to heart. Years later, although his brother had found occasions to profusely apologize for the misguided ‘tough love’ approach, Phil had reflected perhaps he had a point. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing to find his own independence instead of surrendering to a fear of the new and the unknown, even if having a hand to hold along the way, metaphorically or physically, helped to make the experience better.  
There would be times when he could only rely on himself to move forward, to make sense of the world on his own terms. No one could live his experiences for him. No one would hand him courage or motivation when he needed it. He would have to find it within himself. He had survived university and moving to London while taking on a career where success and financial stability had been questionable at best, all because he had made it so, because he had willed himself to stay and see his ambitions through.

With Dan asleep it would be simple to quietly pack what he needed and leave without having to shoulder new stressors in his life or worry over the fatal flaws of his humanity. He could take the train back to the family holiday he’d left behind, leave a note and tell Dan he was mistaken, he didn’t want the responsibility, didn’t want to complicate his life further with something he never asked for, didn’t want to expose himself to vulnerability and chaos when the chances of surviving were minimal. He was well within his right to say no, to walk away and reclaim his life, but as soon as the idea crosses his mind he dismisses it immediately.

If he were more cynical minded he would have chalked it off to the convenience of the secure business investment they had together and how difficult it would be to divvy up the earnings they had previously pooled together to share. Their individual channels had merged into a joint venture. Their contract at Radio 1 covered them as duo hosts, not separate entities and their names had become irrevocably linked with one another so that Phil’s name quickly followed Dan’s in a phrase like a metonym that was more recognizable than their respective usernames. A shrewd business attorney might have called it ill advised to sever all ties now when their careers had coalesced into a phenomenon ranging millions of viewers rather than thousands, not when ratings and views soared in videos where they featured together.  
Looking over at Dan however, Phil sees a person not an investment, a tall messy haired boy that looked all too vulnerable in sleep despite a transformation which housed a predator somewhere within the framework of his anatomy. Phil sees a friend he’d met nearly six years ago when they’d both first begun their online adventures, embarking into a genre of film that was new and uncertain.

In Dan, he had found a co-conspirator in laughter and creativity, a thoughtful, driven force of equal indomitable will that complemented his own so that in time their capabilities swelled and melded into one cohesive force, pushing and pulling each other along like the working gears of a clock in mutual inspiration. Past the derision and skeptiscm of acquaintances that didn’t understand they’d found comfort in how well their individual strangeness had worked so well together to create a self-contained universe which had gone on to resonate with viewers on a global scale. As business partners and as friends they were more formidable together rather than apart, an alliance made all the stronger for their shared travails and successes. In the grand scheme of everything they’d already faced, from private upheavals to wrangling the pecuniary intricacies of their careers while balancing social media, critics, friends and their own emotional well-being, what were vampires to all that?

 _Well, I never had to worry about being a potential appetizer before_ , Phil thinks, looking over at Dan dozing on at his side. _But the plan will always be about being your best friend. Even now. Nothing’s changed about that._

Dan takes another shallow breath and on the exhale it escapes his nose in a low snuffle of a snort as if providing his own answer to Phil’s silent affirmation. It’s a reply as good as any he’s liable to get with Dan in too deep of a slumber to wake and discuss their options further, not that he’s certain there’s anything left to talk about beyond what they had already confessed in the dark of his room without any words needed to define what they meant. The rest is up to him and past the small misgivings of self-doubt still lurking at the back of his thoughts, he resolves to stay.

_I should probably wash up while I’m at it. Can’t say I’m hungry for anything right now and I’m not going to drift off on my own anytime soon, so I might as well. It’s better than just sitting here and imagining more things lurking in my room where I can’t see them._

He edges out of bed slowly so as not to rouse Dan, but at this point he’s convinced nothing short of a cannon blast at close range is liable to wake him. He pauses, feet just touching the carpet of the floor as he considers the shadows in his room. He’s not a child with a fear of the dark and he knows the most terrifying thing lurking in the darkness is just the broken furby sitting on his windowsill, but he reaches over to snap on his bedside lamp all the same, taking time to slip on his glasses and dispel the blurry murk filling the corners of his room. When he does ‘Der Kindestod’ is revealed to be nothing more sinister than two jackets hanging behind his door and Wirrow’s wild thing resumes its benign form of playful creature on the wall.

 _Of course_ , he thinks and smiles to himself, scratching the back of his head with a yawn as he heads over to his dresser to grab a fresh pair of underwear and socks.  
As he crosses the room a shuffling noise abruptly comes from behind him and he pulls up short. 

The noise comes again, a rasping slithery commotion of shifting fabric and he turns his head with such speed to look back at the bed that a crick jolts into the muscles of his neck like a branding iron.

Dan’s heart rate and breathing might have no longer regulated itself according to the norms of human biology, but certain other human habits must remain ingrained like muscle memory, evidenced by when he suddenly shifts in his sleep, his body searching out another better more comfortable position that throws back the covers in a restless fit of arms and legs before settling once more into silence. Now his sleeping posture is less like a sleeping lion and more like a splayed starfish, taking up the space Phil had previously occupied. His bare leg sticks out from the knot of sheets and Phil swallows back the memory of their ankles tangled together, locking each other in place with a vice so strong he can still recall the weight of Dan’s hands along his back and arms like the dull ache of a rope burn, but far more pleasant and thrilling.  
It’s a simple thing, an innocuous flash of bare skin, but he feels a sybaritic heat of satisfaction at the sight all the same and for a time he stares, letting the sensation enfold him to the exclusion of all else, dotting out fears and insecurities, uncoiling the taut line of stress down his spine until the loud quiet of the moment, of them both sharing space in his room where they had only hours before shared something far more intimate, becomes a salve to every preoccupation.

It’s all borrowed time, he reminds himself, sex and love, no matter how profound or welcomed, would not keep their problems at bay. The storm outside reminds him of this with its persistent dull clatter of rain against the glass and the offbeat timpani boom of thunder in the distance. There was a world outside this house and countless worlds more of troubles inside their minds to rival even that. Mutual affection might not be an emotional plaster he could rely on forever, but for now it’s enough to quell immediate concerns and he accepts it for what it is. Something to be treasured, something to be protected.

Dan remains in tranquil hibernation as Phil gathers up a fresh pair of pajama bottoms and underwear in his arms and pads over to the door. He gives one quick glance back over his shoulder before leaving, in turn wondering how best to reclaim his side of the bed if Dan was still monopolizing the mattress when he returned.

 _Play his first video and see if he cringes away from the audio_. Phil muses as he heads down the stairs to the bathroom. _No, on second thought, he might just propel himself through the window in his sleep if I did that. Although, I guess if he ever did lose his composure and try to bite me that’s probably the best repellant next to garlic. Or felt tipped pens on wood…_

In the bathroom he hesitates between a proper bath or a shower, but after considering that as nice as a warm soak in scented salts or bath bombs might be, he doesn’t have much enthuse for giving his mind an opportunity to wander off on a tangent of worried frustration as it might if he were alone with nothing but the silence echoing off the tiles and the rain dully thudding against the house. He steps into the tub, toes curling in reflex against the cold of the porcelain under his bare feet and he dials the taps to the usual mix of warm and cool. The spray of the shower head fills the room at once with noise and he’s able to relax further into a semblance of normalcy, as if things were the same, as if Dan wasn’t currently something which shouldn’t exist and as if they didn’t have to worry about an alleged parliament of vampires that might want a better look at the ‘new blood’ and his roommate come the following evening.

_Stop dwelling about it. Just relax._

He admonishes himself and focuses instead on letting his mind drift onto other subjects, the way it most often did when he was in the bath, as if the mixture of soap and water on his skin became reactants for spontaneous creativity and odder trains of thought. He didn’t know what it was exactly, but whenever he busied himself with other tasks or stood in the bath as he was now, with water streaming through his air and down his arms, the strangest most incongruous things would come to mind.

At first he thinks of nothing else except the list of ideas for video projects occupying space in his notes as works in progress. It then occurs to him that soon he might have to cull them for a video to upload. He could already imagine the clamor on his twitter feed from viewers who were eager to know what was happening in his life, to know when the next video was due out and what subject he might be covering next. It would be easy to placate demand with a quick narrative about his strange train ride back to London while glossing over the pertinent details for his hasty departure and why Dan might be taking a brief hiatus from his channel, but then he considers how they were also expected to host their monthly feature on Radio 1 and how selling their managers a story on why they couldn’t appear wouldn’t be as simple as a seven minute video on his channel. In the controlled environments of his bedroom and a video editing suite he could be as discreet as he wished and release only what details he was comfortable with sharing, but in offline commitments that involved face to face conversations with executives during normal business hours in offices with bright fluorescent lighting to reveal the stark pallor of Dan’s skin and his new topical allergy to all things involving daylight, the very idea of discretion becomes impossible.

He could keep viewers and colleagues at bay with a quick volley of emails and tweets detailing urgent appointments or familial concerns that needed immediate attention, but those excuses would only work for so long until something came to a head, either the Night Court’s arrival or the general public’s speculations, and waiting to see which proverbial shoe might drop first brings him right back to the beginning again with a frustrated knot of stress settling just below his shoulder blades.  
The prospect of becoming a one man army with the task of fielding all the concerned questions they might receive over the next few weeks while postponing appointments until they were better able to figure out what do next is exhausting and he briefly considers the merits of hiring a personal assistant.

 _If I had more than two hands I could record, edit and type all at once without a problem. I’d look a bit like an octopus though which isn’t exactly the most attractive image if I’m honest, but it’s practical_ , he thinks as he absentmindedly scrubs at his shoulders.

_Thinking about it, it’d probably get awkward in a hurry. I don’t know if I could control that many arms at the same time, but maybe instead of a hivemind they could be sentient on their own- like Migi from Parasyte- an entire fleet of alien hands capable of multitasking. Then again, even if it’d be nice to cook pancakes, mind the coffee pot, wash the dishes and browse my phone all at the same time, on the other hand, that might be too many hands. Just the one extra might be fine, right in the middle of my chest._

He glances at the suds collecting on his sternum, imagines a third hand protruding from the middle of his ribcage like a strange tree and reconsiders the placement.  
_No, that would probably make wearing shirts too difficult, not to mention filming videos. Even if I angled the camera to focus on a certain point above my chest it would limit all movement or any perspective shots. And when I meet people, which hand are they supposed to shake first? What if I roll over in my sleep to lie on my stomach? What about if I ever needed CPR, would I give myself chest compressions?_

As he continues to rub his shoulders in idle circles while envisioning a third hand slapping away at his chest, a glob of lather on his head falls into his eyes and the sting of it startles him back to the present.

_Right. Probably a sign I’m thinking too seriously about this._

He ducks his head back under the spray to rinse the rest of the soap threatening to blind him and to clear his head of incongruous daydreams, but the idea, however bizarre, is too intriguing to dismiss completely.

_If I worked on the details it might make for a good story. Like a less grim version of Stephen King’s, ‘I Am the Doorway.’ That one was well creepy. No idea if I could put it in an anthology of short stories or incorporate it in a book somehow, but I’ll have to remember it for later._

He finishes rinsing off, dragging his fingers through his hair to chase away the last remnants of shampoo and he thinks perhaps it would be best in the absence of extra limbs or a P.A to sort the bureaucratic aspects of his career to just handle each moment the best he could as time and circumstance allowed.

[No time, no time.]

His subconscious intrudes with a reminder and he forces himself to think only about the warmth of the water as he lingers deliberately under the comforting jet of the spray beading across his skin before closing the taps and stepping out of the tub to reach for a towel. He hums a wavering snippet of a song under his breath as he does, determined not to let heavier thoughts get the best of him.

It would be alright, it would be fine. Somehow they would be okay. They would make it so. He wants to believe it despite the severity of current circumstances because the alternative is too bleak to consider and he doesn’t have a mind to start now.

All will be well, and all will be well and a manner of things will be well.

A snippet of a phrase from a book he’d read long ago, The Talisman, comes to mind, offering its own small talisman-like measure of comfort. It had been ages since he’d read it, ( _was it on that one holiday we took? Sat on the beach next to an ocean I didn’t think could be any bluer?_ ) but offhand he remembers how it had detailed an adventure, an arduous journey of one boy named Jack traveling across the United States, first alone, then with two companions, one of which, his best friend Richard, had accompanied him to the malice ravaged bulk of the Black Hotel to retrieve a legendary bauble that could save an infinity of worlds.  
There were few parallels Phil could draw between the two main characters and himself and Dan. They were worlds apart in circumstance, even if now he was discovering the world he currently inhabited was fraught with just as many threats and monsters with human faces as those in the story, but there’s a stolid gravity to everything they’ve experienced up until this present moment, a defensible alliance of compassion and love, every bit as crucial as that between Richard and Jack, which he can hardly dismiss. There were decisions to be made and difficult changes to weather and he’s beginning to understand the true test here was not only how well they could survive those changes, but also how well they could survive each other.

He catches sight of his reflection in the large plate glass mirror over the sink and with a quick double take prolongs his stare to take better stock of himself. He notices the obvious traits first, his tall stature and his pale skin, all the trademarks of his anatomy everyone else was quick to point out as if he were only inhabiting his body for the first time and hadn’t grown up knowing what he looked like. He sees the echoes of his mother and his father evident in the angles of his face, in the high arched cheekbones and the slight curve of his nose, which Dan had made a firm point one day to call aquiline when he’d caught Phil studying his profile with critical silence in the viewfinder of the camera, rotating his head left and right to watch the way the light bouncing off the far wall made the shadows appear to lengthen the bridge of his nose.

“It’s also avian if you read some of the comments.” Phil had replied without looking away from the screen. “And doesn’t aquiline mean the same thing?”

“Is that your way of telling me to square up for a semantics debate? It’s all just context anyway, but you already know that, Mr. linguistics degree. Fyi, It’s supposed to symbolize the mark of regal bearing and nobility. It…suits you.”

This time Phil had paused and looked up at Dan framed in the middle of the doorway, expecting to see a wry smirk to play off the comment as little more than joking banter, but Dan had been impassive and quiet, eyes focused on the middle distance as if mulling over his own comment. He’d continued to stare in prolonged distraction until Phil broke the silence. “You think I’m regal?”

With that, something had caught Dan’s interest down the hall and he’d glanced away in a hurry with the air of someone who had more urgent appointments to attend than idling in Phil’s bedroom discussing the merits of Physiognomy, but before he’d left in a rush towards the lounge he’d said, “the way you like to carry on about being king of the universe one day, sure.”

Nude and dripping water onto the tiles with a towel clutched in one hand and another draped over his shoulders in a terrycloth facsimile of a cape to soak up the cold damp clinging to his back, Phil can’t find anything particularly noble or regal about his reflection at all. Instead he sees faint echoes of the young boy he once was in primary; the one in uni with hair short and spiked; the one from his early videos bristling with energy and enthusiasm, hair a veritable mane around his face; all of them crowding together in the man he was now, in the person he always had been, one human, Phil Lester, trying to find his way in the world alongside everyone else, without the benefit of a magical object or preternatural powers to sway events in his favor.

Over the years he had changed and yet in many ways he remained the same. Dan himself reflected this contradiction with the most extreme example of his transformation, where despite his supernal abilities, unnatural hunger and how every hallmark of age and experience would be forever preserved so that Dan would always resemble the twenty five year old he currently was, in essence he remained the same. Whatever he was meant to be on a cellular level, it affected nothing of who he was intrinsically. In mind and heart he was still Dan, still wrestling to grapple for meaning and compassion with the same relentless courage of the boy Phil had first met six years ago. It reassured him that as the years passed and their circumstances took on varying twists and turns, who they were at heart would never change, at least not the parts that mattered and Phil only counts himself lucky that whatever else vampires were said to be in fiction Dan resembled nothing of their more revenant natures or the eldritch cruelty of the Type One vampires from the Dark Tower series in which the included illustrations had depicted beings with misshapen claws and runnels of tumorous scars disfiguring mouths crowded with double rows of fangs. Yet, things had still changed in undeniable ways, well beyond anything Phil can grasp or explain and he thinks perhaps this above all else was the crux of his dilemma.

In the wake of what Dan had become, something other than Dan used to be, there’s a needling urgency grating at the back of his mind that he must in turn become something other than just Phil, something more than who he currently was, in order to better cope with all they now faced. It was no longer enough to just ‘be’, to just carry on as they once had. He had to be more, do more, adjust and change, be more proactive and cunning in his approach. It had been gratifying to find himself in film, to share a home, interests and compassion with a friend who accepted the stranger facets of his personality, but he felt lost again, the same frustrating cast adrift sensation he’d experienced between college and uni, when he’d shouldered the pressure of figuring out who he was and what he wanted to do next. Now it’s about more than just pursuing a degree, managing a career and chasing away the unwelcome sensation of being lonely. Now every aspect of their lives was under threat of being scrutinized past the extent it already had been by an anonymous court of creatures with nothing but the worst intentions in mind.

If Dan claimed to be out of his depth then he was entirely out of place here in a situation that no amount of Buffy marathons could hope to prepare him for.

 _Even Xander could fight or shore up Buffy’s house every time she kicked a demon through a window_ , he thinks as he turns away from the mirror and continues to towel off the water clinging to his arms. _Granted, neither of us makes for much of a Scooby gang and even they faced situations where they were in over their heads, but they had the benefit of choreographed fights and scripted resolutions where everyone could walk away unscathed. Well, for the most part anyway…_

Books and movies offered the security of planned, through endings where all it took was one retrieved artifact, one perilous journey, to tie up every loose end and save the world, but with Game of Thrones and Tarantino films bounding about his head as reference he knows not even the world of fiction could guarantee safe resolutions for its protagonists. There’s far less security offered in a world subject to arbitrary laws of luck and circumstance where sometimes not even fortitude, kindness or strength were enough to keep conflict at bay. The only recourse left to him was fixating on the small hope that somehow, eventually, it truly would be alright. Self-fulfilling prophecies didn’t always have to be negative and he thinks if latent stubbornness could be a virtue; if there was any truth at all in the power of repetitive affirmation, then he would continue to believe that all would be well until it was, until between hope and conviction he might be guided to exactly what he needed to do when the time came. For both their sakes.

He lifts his chin and hums a snippet of ‘This Love’ under his breath as he works a towel over his hair, willing himself into a better frame of mind with the upbeat tune of the chorus. When nothing else worked, music always helped to change his mood whenever he was feeling less than enthused about the day.

 _So why not try it now_ , he thinks.

As he immerses himself in the rhythm, humming turns into singing the lyrics under his breath, all the while basking in how well the bouncing acoustics of the bathroom tiles make the vocals sound. He wonders if it might be possible to film another singing exercise with Carrie, but in the bathroom this time where he was sure he’d sound much better on playback instead of in his room. Then he pauses to think about the image of the both of them crowded by the bathroom sink, awkwardly stood side by side for a video and he quickly crosses out the idea.  
_No, that would probably be too weird._

His mood lifts and he’s back to carefree until the moment he steps into his pajamas, dons his glasses and spins in place to the beat of the song in his head, promptly colliding his raised left foot against the glass edge of the bathroom door with a forcible bang.

Instantly, the exuberant spin devolves into an improvised ‘pain dance’ to the sink between a string of ‘ows’ and sucked breath between his teeth. As he grabs onto the counter for support, his ankle burning with the promise of a black and blue tomorrow, he thinks it might be better in the interest of personal health to finish up and head back to his bedroom before ending up in A&E with a fractured limb.

_Who knew free form dancing to Maroon 5 could be so dangerous?_

After leaving the bathroom on his way back to bed he stops only once in the kitchen for a glass of cold water to bring with him and when he finally makes it to his room with a slight hopping limp down the hall, it’s little past three in the morning and the rain outside has stopped again. Not much else has changed in his brief absence.  
He finds Dan still inert, still arranged in the same haphazard position except for where he’s shifted over to allow Phil his side of the bed. Grateful that he doesn’t have to resort to Mortal Kombat techniques in order to reclaim his pillow, Phil slides back under the sheets and rests his back against the headboard. He sets his glass down on the bed stand and glances over to see if Dan might have been disturbed by the rise and fall of the mattress, but his comatose slumber holds strong.

_I could probably do jumping jacks next to his head and he still might not wake up. There’s an idea for a video: The sleeping vampire challenge. ‘What does it take to wake up a sleeping vampire? One British boy from London finds out. Hit thumbs up and subscribe if you’d like to see more videos about aggravating the undead. Hit 999 if the undead start aggravating you.’_

He’d expected to fall asleep shortly after clambering back under the cocoon of his duvet, but even with the calming warmth of the shower, his mind is still wide awake. His mother’s advice reoccurs to him, but he decides in the end to eschew eating a snack in favor of resorting to the one proven remedy for boredom and insomnia when all else failed: the internet.

He snatches up his laptop and at first he opens the browser for flash games or videos he could idly watch until his brain succumbed, but then he navigates away and opens a tab to Google’s search bar. If his inability to fall asleep was due in large part to his difficulty in coping with the knowledge that the impossible suddenly existed, that it was real, that Dan embodied it down to every cell and fiber of his being and they were both in considerable danger from more relevant threats to come, then maybe he could research it to try to understand, to gain a better, more organized perspective which could help him internalize everything that happened to them over the past few days.

_I don’t suppose Nat Geo has documentaries on the politics of vampire behavior and the chance I’ll actually find anything useful on the internet is about as far-fetched as watching Loch Ness monster footage on YouTube for proof that Nessie exists, but what other options do I have?_

He tries Wikipedia first, juggling around search terms until he finds himself measuring Dan’s respiratory rate while comparing it to an entry on human respiration. Without a stethoscope and only a vague idea for how to gauge respiratory rates in the first place he improvises his own informal study which largely involves staring at Dan’s chest and counting off the intervals of minutes between each prolonged inhale and exhale.  
To his best estimation Dan reads in at only two breaths a minute and Phil doesn’t need to consult a medical journal to know that should be impossible. Anything below twelve breaths a minute is dire, the article on his screen concludes, a precursor to conditions he can barely pronounce, including bradypnoea, hypoxia, prolonged apnea and an exhaustive list more of concerning afflictions that reminds him why he never trusted the internet for a medical diagnosis as each condition, more severe than the last, all lead up to the ultimatum of death.

_Which thankfully is a moot point in Dan’s case._

He continues to scour blogs and news articles, led on by a web of external links and footnotes at the bottom of every Wikipedia page he clicks on, but all confirm what he already knows. Everything about Dan defies explanation and whatever laws of science now defined his biology as of yet had no name.  
He opens a tab back to Google and switches tactics, this time searching for anything he can find about vampires, but as he skims through forums catering to vampire lifestylers and the differences between vampires spelled with a ‘Y’ instead of an ‘I,’ he becomes less confident about discovering any groundbreaking information that might apply to them. He leaves off from the forums to instead browse websites about single celled vampyrellids and other nocturnal creatures with a hunger for blood. Soon he’s watching videos featuring deep sea vampire squid and after three more clips of other incongruous subjects like basking sharks and fangtooth fish he has to keep himself from going off on an ocean life documentary binge.

Twenty three open tabs and forty five minutes later, he’s no closer to understanding Dan’s extraordinary transformation or his place in the world it now defined. It made sense after all for creatures that relied on anonymity to mistrust transparency and not discuss their feeding habits or nocturnal etiquette for the rest of the world to find. Somewhere perhaps, on a website allocated to the Deep Web, under cover of proxies and passwords, hidden away from any standard search engine’s results, there might be a whisper of information to be had, but apart from posting an inquiry on Reddit he knows would soon be crawling with trolls in response, there’s no other way he can think of to gain a heads up on what to do or what to expect.

 _Maybe the problem is that you can’t sympathize with this. Maybe you need to empathize with it_ , his subconscious suggests, _and you know there’s only one way to do that._

“In me…in you. Blood and blood.”

He can still hear Dan’s voice in his head, a low rumble of intent that had taken all his resolve to deny. He remembers how Dan’s eyes had darkened over into occluded pools of black in his face and how his fangs had grown long in his mouth, the same fangs Dan had been all too eager to slip into his neck last night and he still can’t say whether he would have welcomed the sting of them or not in the heat of the moment.  
At the time, drowsy with afterglow and an emotion too strong to be simply called love, he had lingered dangerously close to arching his neck and allowing Dan to do as he’d wished; to bring them together in a union more dire and intimate than what they had just shared.

He’d tasted a glimpse of that power when he’d caught Dan’s throat under his teeth, grazing the skin and applying careful degrees of pressure until he’d been afraid of drawing blood, but Dan had insisted with a breathy whine and a roiling undulation of hips as he feigned vulnerability despite how easily he could have thrown Phil off across the room if he’d wanted. All that strength held in check by nothing more than a bite and Phil’s body laid across his. Phil had understood then what being a vampire meant, what it would mean to drink the vitality of the body beneath his, steal every drop to sustain the disguise of being alive and as Phil replays the moment in his mind he’s surprised at feeling regret over not accepting Dan’s proposal when it was offered. What an idea it was, to steal through London in the latest evening hours without fear, all his muscles filled with incalculable strength and speed, faced with an eternity of evenings to enjoy and do with as he pleased, prefaced with the promise of centuries where he could reinvent himself without consequence- all of it with Dan at his side as they made a new meaning out of immortality, joined their names and bodies and blood together in a union to rival the definitions and conventions of a traditional relationship. No constraints, just all the time in the world for him to turn the boring and the ordinary into anything but.

Over time, he knows that if he continues to reject Dan’s invitation there would come a point when youth and middle aged segued into senior, when their age and circumstances differed so greatly, that being with Dan, blood and blood as he had put it, would no longer matter. He already surpassed Dan by four years and he wouldn’t become any younger than he was now. Time flew and there was no room in its arbitrary system for indecision or fear, not when every minute was a precious resource to be cherished and utilized, but living as a human was one thing and being something else was….something else.

He can’t imagine himself in the role of an active hunter, tracking and biting his prey with the same cold efficiency the vampire in the alleyway had exhibited. Dan hadn’t succumbed to the urge despite the great temptation etched on his face when he’d stared at Phil’s bleeding finger in the kitchen, but perhaps it was only a matter of time before he traded butcher bought for a more ‘organic, northern’ taste. It makes him wonder, what would it be like to slip through the shadows and drink blood? He thinks if the torturous look of ecstasy on Dan’s face had been any indication, it was a lesson in overwhelming ecstatic lust. It was strange how Dan had obviously relished the taste when the smell from the kitchen had been less than savory and more a horrendous pungent stench reminiscent of the sour reek of brine or cheese.

Maybe it’s different when one’s a vampire, he supposes, when blood’s a necessity more than a commodity, maybe it became incomparable to any favorite cuisine he’d ever eaten, maybe just as sweet as a glass of chilled Vimto. He can’t help the morbid curiosity at wondering nor the accompanying compulsion to prod Dan awake to reconsider the offer to be a vampire.

But again a string of caveats makes him hesitate just as he had done when Dan first extended the offer. Friends, family, work- all the things which required day time hours and a human disposition to accomplish and enjoy would be lost to him. They would have to be more careful about their appearances in public; measure every word and gesture; be mindful of any vlogging camera trained not so subtly in their direction. It wasn’t as simple as saying yes to immortality and buying U.V tint for their windows, but he also wonders if such a drastic change might not actually be what he needed.

He remembers Dan’s encouragement, the way he’d emphasized everything about Phil which mattered in a quiet voice transformed to a resonant echo in Phil’s memory:  
“Whatever I am right now, however impossible and incredible it is, it will never measure up to you. You will always be the most captivating person I’ve ever met and sometimes I wonder how on earth you could have ever decided to be best friends with me at all. You, just as you are, has always been enough. The same way it’s enough for you that I stayed- it’s enough for me too.”

At the time, Phil had warmed to the words, embraced the compassion behind it without a second thought, but now he wonders if it really was enough to be captivating and incredible when not even the best compliments could help their dilemma.

AmazingPhil. The name has never felt like more of an assumptive label, a misnomer that was no longer lighthearted, but an ironic jab at his mundanity.

_What if staying the way I am isn’t enough anymore?_

The question already loomed over his head without the jarring reality of Dan’s transformation to underscore it, especially when the oft repeated implication from friends and colleagues on YouTube was things had changed considerably from years ago. In the wake of new algorithms and involved audiences there might no longer be any room for veterans who couldn’t step to with something better, something more interesting and engaging, something that wasn’t just a boy with a fringe on a bed discussing the daily adventures of his life as he’d once done before. Now, looking over at Dan and gauging the dormant power in the lax muscles of arms that could crush him at a whim, measuring the increased degrees of difference between them both, on how much he as just human is a detriment in a world encompassing creatures of dangerous cunning where a human had no place to be, he feels less of anything recognizable as Phil, amazing or otherwise. It’s a curiously empty sensation.

[ _Something’s missing_.]

As a vampire however, he and Dan would have equal footing, both of them matched in strength and the ability to defend each other. There would still be a sea of unknowns to wade through, but as two vampires they could make better sense of it together. It was part of the reason for why he had felt more comfortable living with Dan rather than with someone who wasn’t a Youtuber and might not understand the career. With Dan he could ask for advice on the delivery of a line, exchange ideas and collaborate on projects to their mutual benefit. As a vampire who could share Dan’s new perspective, things could be the same, but before he can convince himself of the advantages, the image of the vampire in the alleyway comes to mind again- The indifferent smile, the long white fangs behind the mouth, the cruel efficiency with which Dan had been thrown off and Phil remembers another old adage of his mother’s: nothing in life is free. What if after the passage of endless centuries the eventual payoff for the ‘gift’ of immortality was dyspathy, until time whittled down compassion to a cynical shadow of itself?  
With Dan, the question remained. As the blood and the years continued to work its way into his veins, marking him further with all the power that immortality and predation entailed, would Dan one day look back on empathy as a commodity he no longer cared to indulge, until he viewed Phil as a quaint luxury, a human that he could destroy at any time, old affections notwithstanding?

On the heels of that thought another more bizarre one occurs to him: do androids dream of electric sheep?

He frowns and it takes a moment for him to recognize the random phrase from the book of the same name, one he remembered browsing ages ago after a conversation with PJ about classic sci-fi films. Only paraphrased excerpts of the book stick out in his memory, replaced by Blade Runner’s more impactful visual interpretation, but the question persists and he varies it further to fit the current situation. If the question of androids dreaming related to their ability to feel and emphasize, if dreaming itself was a metaphor for all the range of human emotions, did vampires dream of blood? Given time would they cease to dream at all? And in the absence of dreams might they allow the savagery of their nature to dictate the course of their lives and relationships?

A bevy more of similiar run on thoughts cycle through his head and he thinks maybe after all these years of living together something of Dan’s philosophical predilections must be rubbing off on him.

Humanity, empathy, immortality, death-all the ontological questions he’d once given a cursory look to in passing, have, in the course of a single evening, risen to the fore with new importance he finds himself at a loss to organize with any meaningful relevance. Death and impermanence were concepts he’d long ago classified as uncomfortable inevitabilities without easy resolution. He was more content focusing his energies on the immediate world around him or on imagining positive concepts like a future where even the inevitability of mortality might have been superseded by androids with the ability to love, hope and dream just like their flesh and bone ancestors, without the threat of disease or death to harm them.

If he were Dan he supposes he might have been able to find a comforting awareness of being from comparing theories and philosophical quandaries in an attempt to make sense of the insensible, but the contemplative silence only leaves him quietly frustrated with rehashing the same problem over and over. On one occasion, he remembered Dan holding a mostly one sided conversation with him about the idea of meaning and what if there was no meaning at all when finally he’d quietly interjected with a question of his own

“What if there is meaning then? What if we find out one day everything has a quantifiable origin and purpose, would that make you feel any better? No, think about it. Would death, disease, violence-all the worst of it- have a better context if that kind of suffering had a purpose? Do you really want to think about what kind of end possibly serves that means?”

Dan had fallen silent and stared at him for a time.  
“Is that why you don’t talk about this stuff with me,” he’d asked finally. “You don’t like to think about the implications?”

“I don’t talk about it because there’s nothing to talk about. Nobody’s ever going to agree on one explanation and I don’t know if it can be explained to begin with. The world’s bigger than just one label no matter how many theories people like to bang on about. When I think about life it’s more like what I want to do to be happy or what I want to change about myself or my ideas, things I can affect in the here and now, things that matter in the moment. Talking about death-“

Phil had looked away and frowned while the fingers of his right hand reflexively clenched into the palm of his hand before relaxing.  
“It’s sad. Nothing makes it easier. You shoulder the loss and it never really leaves you. Talking about it or what might happen after or why it has to happen at all to the people we love the most-it doesn’t make the concept any more comfortable and if I did think about it I’d probably never sleep again. I understand why you think about it so much, but at the same time I don’t. Even if you asked me about-I dunno- cyborgs and monsters or why marmite even exists, I could embrace those kinds of rhetorical questions better than about something so heavy. It’s not that I can’t-I’d just rather not.”

Back then it had been easier to appreciate Dan’s existentialist debates as a bystander, not a participant. The immediacy of the moment however forces him to think of all the heavy-handed concepts he’d once dismissed in favor of better, lighter pursuits and through it all he wonders if saying yes to eternity might not be the lesser evil in a string of unresolved questions more conflicting than any tautological argument.

“You’re freaking out.”

A cold shock of surprise startles Phil back to the present with a jump that nearly spills his laptop onto the floor and knocks the headboard against the wall with a smack. Dan peers up at him, the side of his face still pressed against the pillow, eyes shrouded by the ringlet snarled state of his hair spilling over and around his face. It’s a vaguely feral look. His posture hasn’t changed but the hairs on the nape of Phil’s neck tingle to attention as Dan continues to stare, an inscrutable expression on his face.

_How long has he been awake? His eyes-are they dilated or is it just the shadows in the room making them look so large and dark?_

As if sensing Phil’s alarm or perhaps smelling it the way he had smelled the tinge of fear wafting off him earlier, Dan rises to a sitting position, moving each limb in a torpid purposeful way as if to send Phil the message that he meant no harm. Phil’s pulse increases regardless. Dan has never looked more intimidating. His shoulder blades dip and rise as he gathers himself up from the sheets like a large cat bunching its muscles before pouncing. It’s the same measured coordination he’d exhibited earlier when Phil had first returned home and found Dan in the darkened cave of his room, when Dan had moved towards him, scenting the air with raw intentful hunger. There’s a certain sensuous rhythm to the way Dan moves as well, an added note of graceful fluidity to the swell of his muscles and the curve of his hips that Phil can’t remember being there before and the combination of erotic and dangerous catches the breath in his throat.

“You’re freaking out,” Dan repeats in a quieter tone. He sits up, one leg submerged in the coiled sheets of the bed, the other laying exposed in a long white line of flank that draws Phil’s eye before he catches himself.

“I’m not freaking out,” he says and he’s aware Dan must hear the lie in the sound of his pulse.

If he does Dan says nothing and merely looks at him, his entire body leaning away from where Phil tenses up against the headboard to give him space as if they hadn’t just lain chest to chest some hours before. Phil watches as Dan takes in the state of his hair, still damp from the shower and the laptop balanced on his legs with the screen displaying a menagerie of open tabs. He continues to say nothing, merely watching, thinking. Then he sighs and gives a wan smile communicating nothing but affectionate exasperation.

“Did you get _any_ sleep?”

“A bit,” Phil admits. “Then I woke up and couldn’t fall asleep again.”

“So you thought you’d pop over to Google for some late night browsing. Relatable.” Dan gives him an approving thumbs up. “Find anything on your internet travels then?”

“No. Well, I did find one interesting fact,” Phil says, grateful for something to focus on that isn’t the unconsciously sensuous danger still evident in Dan’s posture or the way his eyes appear darker than their usual brown. “I searched for some of what you told me you were experiencing-all the heightened smells and sounds- and apparently there’s a term called oxyaesthesia which defines it pretty accurately. It’s like what you said about hyperosmia, except it’s not just a heightened sensitivity to smell. It includes every sensory experience. Touch, sight, sound, taste- but I haven’t read anything about someone able to smell emotions. Although, my mother has synesthesia and she’ll say months and numbers are certain colors, so it’s probably not impossible. No clue how it happens or why, but I thought it was noteworthy.”

“Oxyaesthesia. That’s definitely a word.” Dan raises his eyebrows. “We never learned that in A Levels. I figured you’d be off playing a flash game or doing a google map search like you usually do when you can’t sleep, not preparing for University Challenge.”

“I figured I’d just-research a few things. See if there wasn’t anything I could find that might help us.”

“Well, I’m definitely not a type of amoebae, so you can scratch that out,” Dan says with another glance at the laptop and one tab’s heading entitled vampyrellidae. “Not sure Google’s the best place to search for anything on vampires. Just a matter of time before the forums and RP sites turn into weird manifestos.”

Dan squints. “You-why do you have five tabs open about giant isopods?”

Phil quickly snaps the lid close and places the laptop on his bed stand. “I got distracted. They’re like a mega evolved wood louse.”

“They’re horrific whatever the size. I never get why some people like them so much. In Japan they even have gift shops filled with wood louse themed merch. Who would bring one of those back as a souvenir?” Dan shakes his head. “Still doesn’t explain why you were freaking out before or what kind of help you’re trying to find searching for all this stuff in the first place.”

Phil hesitates. Any explanation other than the truth would be a deflection and Dan would know as soon as the wrong words left his mouth, would probably smell the flinch of a lie on him even before speaking.

 _Just tell him._ His subconscious prods at him with impatience. _He told you about everything that happened to him and about how vulnerable it made him feel when he could have just convinced you to forget the entire evening and everything you saw with the same ease as that vampire in the alley compelled you to be his hostage. Just tell him, because there’s no time for playing on false bravado when there’s too much at stake. Don’t let him misinterpret self-doubt as you doubting him._

“It’s hard to sleep when I want to help and I don’t know how.” He doesn’t embellish the explanation any further and falls short of admitting it had less to do with not being sure how to help and more about not being sure if in the end, he needed to change all of who he was to compensate for their new circumstances.

“What do you mean?” Dan sits up taller against the headboard, exasperation giving way to concern. “Help how? We can’t exactly draft out a course of action, not when we don’t have a clue what to expect and even if we did, what difference would it make? It’s not like we could rig the house like Home Alone and dump a gallon of paint on a vampire’s head.”

“But it’s an idea.” Phil smirks, imagining two elder vampires stood at the front stoop, grasping the doorknob to break in and receiving a palmful of third degree burns for their trouble. “I know we can’t exactly plan for anything, but I feel like I should be doing something, not just reacting to things as they happen. I should be able to- I don’t know…do something.”

“This isn’t a situation where anything either of us tries to do might help. I’m just realizing that now if I’m honest. I’m immortal, I have all this strength and speed, but it’s not like I’m Thor.”

“Thunder and lightning…” Phil says on an afterthought.

“So very, very frightening.” They finish the lyric in unison without thinking about it and with a single shared glance in the pressured bubble of silence that follows, they burst into laughter.

“No, seriously,” Dan continues when the humor of the moment has passed, “what do you mean you should be able to do something? What do you want to do exactly?”

“That’s the thing-I don’t know!” Phil musses his hair in aggravation and his fingers come away damp with small beads of water still clinging to his scalp. “It feels like everything is moving on without me and I’m not sure how to keep up. This isn’t about filing tax returns or brainstorming a video project or planning for the next radio show. I know I can do all that, I know what I’m capable of, but it doesn’t mean anything here. When whatever happens eventually does happen, I’m not sure what I’m meant to do.”

There. It’s out. But he doesn’t feel any better after the admission. He’d rather move the conversation along to anything other than his own perceived shortcomings, but it’s a difficult subject to avoid when the only topic of relevant interest was how they both expected to manage the impending damage control when the Night Court found them.

“You don’t have to do anything.” Dan is adamant, each word inflected with conviction. “There’s nothing you could do that would make you more necessary or important than you already are. I meant it when I said none of this can work without you.”

“I know. I believe you, but I can’t help worrying about it…whether that’s really enough.”

He can’t find a good way to explain the urge to sort out their situation before things came to a head despite knowing how impossible it was for anyone to stave off the inevitable, but the sensation of missing something important remains as if he were waiting to resolve the final piece of a puzzle that would reveal everything would be alright and that existing as he was right now was more than enough to suffice. Yet, despite Dan’s encouragements and his own drive to look for the positive aspects of any situation, he remains frustrated. It’s a harried undercurrent of emotion and he hates the way it clings to him like a second skin, inducing the same stomach churning sensation that came from being suspended in high places, like the time he’d peered down at the tangle of metal rails and hard ground extended many feet beneath him on a stopped roller coaster, afraid that at any minute the ride would start up again with a jolt to send him careening over the edge.

 _There’s nothing we can do_ , he thinks, _and that’s the scary part about all of it. What happened to Dan, whatever happens next- there’s no way to prepare, nothing we can do to change anything. And if we survive, where does that leave us after? Where do we go from here?_

As soon as he thinks of the last question, like a triggered alarm, his subconscious immediately segues into the song of the same name from the one Broadway musical-esque episode of Buffy. The chorus starts in earnest, stuck on repeat like a bad tangent in his thoughts despite his best attempts to stop it until Dan speaks up to interrupt.

“If I remember correctly,” he says, “you were the one who said we could handle this together without overthinking whatever’s outside of our control, which in this case is all of it.”

“Yeah, I did and you were the one who said there was too much we hadn’t considered yet.”

“And at ten to four in the morning you’re considering it.”

“I can’t help it. It’s not much different from the times you walk around your room late at night and I’d hear the floorboards creaking through the walls at three in the morning.”

Dan takes on a mildly affronted expression. “You know it’s just a thing I do.”

“I know it’s something you do. I don’t mind, but I’d always wonder what was going on when things were bad enough you had to pace your room and you couldn’t tell me why.”

“It’s not that I couldn’t tell you.” Dan sighs. “I just already know some of the things I worry about are these extraneous details I could probably handle on my own with a little time and better perspective, but in the spur of the moment I get caught up in the logistics of figuring out the how’s and why’s. It’s this obsessive introspection that kick starts itself in the middle of the night and I wake up with every preoccupation magnified a hundred percent. Then it won’t let me fall asleep again until I’ve exhausted myself doing something else or going over the problem with a fine tooth comb to get the cathartic satisfaction over figuring it out for myself rather than feeling like I’m trying to pass along the burden of responsibility to someone else or like I’m trying to ignore everything even if I’d rather crawl back to bed and forget about it. Do you know what I mean?”

Phil nods slowly. “I think so. I was halfway to pacing the entire flat before I thought I’d distract myself better with a shower and then with Google. Does that really help you, thinking about it like that?”

“Not always. It’s like my own form of meditation I suppose. Sometimes it leads up to a breakthrough like when I’m trying to make a video come together in just the right way. Other times, it’s just overwhelming and I end up right where I started.” Dan pauses to study him. “You really are worried about this.”

“A bit.” Phil stops; reconsiders. “More than a bit.”

“Huh.” Dan nods to himself after another protracted interval of observation. “I never knew what exactly ‘freaking out’ smelled like, that it smelled like anything at all, but now I know.”

“I am not-” Phil sighs and drops the argument before it begins. Dan could be just as stubborn as he was when fixated on a point he wanted to make and Phil decides it better to concede a small defeat and change the subject before having to admit to himself that part of it was true. “Fine. Go on then. What does it smell like?”

“That’s the main reason I woke up. I thought you’d left the kettle on in the kitchen at first. I was about to go tearing in there to turn it off. You know the smell when the water’s boiled for so long it’s all evaporated-that smell of the glass and rubber heating up just before it’s reached the point of melting and starting a fire? Like that.”

Phil lifts his arm and sniffs. “And I just took a shower too.”

“It doesn’t work like that, you berk. I told you.”

“I know. Joking.” Phil hurriedly lowers his arm as Dan laughs, not unkindly. “You could probably create a new line of scented candles with that ability.”

“Are you kidding? Every scent is so potent I’d probably choke halfway through testing my own products. Imagine if I did though? An exclusive set of candles available at Marks & Spencer’s with names like, ‘eau-de-unrelenting-worry-aka-kettle-almost-on-fire’ and ‘room-sprays-with-labels-like-spring-rain-smell-more-like-flowery-chemicals-than-rain-so-here’s-a-candle-that-smells-like-coconut-instead.’ ”

“That last one’s too long.”

“Not if the company name is registered under Fall Out Boy ltd.”

A beat of silence follows and Phil returns the deadpan expression on Dan’s face before responding.  
“That was terrible.”

“Yeah, it really was.” Dan winces in sympathetic embarrassment and passes a hand through the rumpled curls of his hair. “I could have tried harder but it’s difficult to think of witty rejoinders when you’re worried about future consequences where if I can’t do YouTube anymore, becoming a reclusive candle maker might be an actual career option instead of just a bad joke.”

They both fall silent, each of them staring ahead at nothing and Phil knows the same thought has occurred to the both of them at the same time. Proceeding as usual, banking on the idea that their careers and lives might resume in the same manner as it always had, was no longer viable, not without rethinking how to manage a secret of such magnitude without further endangering themselves or those around them. They’re each lost to their respective worries, registering the soft shadows and stillness of the room before Dan speaks again.

“Everything is so quiet, I feel like I could drift off and forget about everything.” Dan looks over at the poster of the Wild Thing on the wall and considers its wide-eyed stare.  
“At the same time, it’s like everything is on fire all the time. You know, the way everything seems so urgent and critical. Maybe it always was and I’m just realizing that now. I just want to understand how to deal with it so I don’t get burned. Or maybe that’s the idea, to let it happen anyway on my own terms, burn my bridges and all that. I don’t know.”

Dan looks down at his hands and flexes his fingers slowly. “It’s just- having all this power-knowing that you’ve been granted more control over your life than you were ever prepared to have, not knowing what to do with it and realizing that if things go wrong you have no one else to blame but yourself- it’s terrifying in a way. It’s like back when I was a freshman in uni and lived in the dorms, it dawned on me how much I didn’t know about being an adult or wading through all the responsibilities that come implicit with being on your own for the first time. I could do anything, but I had no idea where to begin. Even without the Night Court to complicate matters, that hasn’t changed. I’m still the same mess of a person, only with more people watching for every misstep while I try to cope with myself and the world at large and hopefully not fuck up too spectacularly along the way.”

“Then, other times I feel like I could care less about the world, that this is enough, that if I have you here, who needs anything or anyone else? I get out to events and gatherings and I always end up looking in your direction and deciding you’re the most galvanizing presence in the room. And you are, but it’s dangerous. Sometimes I feel as if I’m blinding myself to everything else because I’m so used to things being lighter and easier when you’re around. Then I get struck with this headstrong urge to challenge myself, get out there, prove I can exist comfortably outside your orbit.”

Phil puzzles over what he means with a frown. “Prove to who? To yourself or to others?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s to myself and sometimes it’s to other people, or the people that look at me and take a fragment of the whole and try to interpret me for themselves with only a scrap of whatever information they’ve decided is most incisive for their translations. And that’s the thing-it should hardly matter. Why should I have to explain anything at all? Why should I have to prove who I already know I am- when sometimes I just want to keep certain parts of myself to myself? I’m more than just one thing, more than any one translation from a stranger I’ve never met, even now, even like this, and I know I can be just fine shutting myself indoors with you and blasting programmes on the TV and forgetting about it all and being just fine for it. Because it’s good, this here with you is good and sometimes it worries me that it’s too good to be true and if something happened, if- I don’t know. If you left-if you weren’t with me anymore- I’d be too caught up in everything you are to remember how to live for myself.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Phil draws himself up, vehement and insistent. “And I told you before, you’d do just fine on your own. There’s certain aspects of our career we can’t do anything about now, but that’s not to say we’re not still individuals and that’s not to say I’ll ever hold you back from doing something you’d like to try for yourself.”

“No, it’s not that I think you’re a limiting force. You’re just the opposite. You always have been…” Dan trails off with the effort to find the right words.  
“It’s like you and agonizing over not being able to help when you already know there’s really not much we can do. It’s the same kind of relentless worry without a reasonable basis for it. I’m just…worried. You think you’re not helping-I have no idea what I’m doing. The scope of what we’re facing is greater than anything we’ve dealt with before and I want to meet it head on. Just grit teeth and bared knuckles all the way without crying off, but at the same time, there’s a lot I’m struggling to grasp. It’s like accidentally pouring boiling water into the last bowl of your favorite cereal and watching it melt right in front of your eyes without being able to do a thing about it. That same kind of helpless feeling of not knowing what else to do and wanting to sleep for a week until you’re able to face the day without letting the small things get to you. Except the only thing that matters now are the small things and I barely understand what they are.”

Dan gives a small rueful laugh and picks at a fraying thread on the bed sheet covering his lap. “I feel like I’m just that eighteen year old with a bad webcam and too many long pauses between takes all over again, but with you I don’t. I never have. And it’s bad because even with the gravity of the situation I just want to tell the world, vampires and all, to sod off so I can be here with you like this, where it’s not about being brave or being more than people’s ideas of me or doubting my ideas about myself. This is simpler, even when it’s not. Even with the promise of eternity ahead of me I just want to exist here with you. When you have it so good it’s difficult to want anything else.”

Ringing silence follows Dan’s words, filtered only by the rush of Phil’s pulse in his ears and the minute drip of left over rain water falling from the gutters along the roof outside. The pause between them demands a response, a word of acknowledgement equal to the strength of Dan’s declaration, but Phil pulls up short at the last minute of opening his mouth to speak.

_What do I say? What can I say?_

Another passage from The Talisman occurs to Phil then, a moment he remembered reading between Jack and his best friend, when at the end of trials more fantastic and tragic than the last Jack had turned to Richard and said, “I love you.” A simple three word phrase Richard could do little more than blink back tears to in response, throat too thick with exhaustion and overwhelmed emotion to say anything else. In the ensuing silence Jack had then remembered a phrase from his mother, offering up her own sardonic turn of affectionate advice: “Sometimes, Jack-O, it’s not necessary to spill your guts from your mouth.”

It wasn’t necessary, Phil thought, words could be overreaching things, could get tangled up in afterthoughts and regrets, tripping over their own language to find the right way to express something more than their definitions allowed, but sometimes, Phil reflects while holding Dan’s gaze, when it was the right person speaking, words could be more than enough.

The pause grows, fills the room like a physical creature and the expectation for him to say something lingers in the way Dan searches his face for any reaction at all.

“I hit my ankle on the bathroom door.”  
He blurts out the confession in a rush and only after he’s said it does he realize this might not have been the best response.

Maybe Jack’s mother was right, he thinks with a small flustered pocket of heat gathering at his cheeks, maybe there were times when it was better to say nothing at all, not when you’d much rather physically demonstrate your affections than risk saying the first wrong thing which came to mind.

Dan blinks, taken aback in confusion, but then his expression shifts into one of stifled amusement as he bites his lip in a way Phil recognizes as an attempt to hold back laughter.

“Alright then. Let’s see the trauma wound,” he says.

The heat in his cheeks gathers and builds, but Phil hikes up the cuff of his pyjamas without protest to show the aggravated red line on his leg.

“Hmm.” Dan peers down with the air of a physician studying their patient for a diagnosis, thumb and forefinger curled around his chin as he nods. “Brutal. You just walked into the door?”

“Danced into it actually.”

“Two left feet syndrome strikes again. Good thing you’re not a stage performer or you’d have fallen off ages ago.”

Phil laughs. “Maybe, but with a little training I think I could find enough coordination to hold my own.”

“Right. I can see it now: You, a choreography with Rockette style high kicks and a side of physical therapy when you bash your other ankle against a floor light.”

“No, seriously, it’s not such a bad idea. I’ve thought about it before, how we could write something for the stage, like Once More with Feeling. You remember? That episode of Buffy?”

“With the guy melodically singing about the dry cleaners getting the mustard stain out of his shirt while the rest of the customers play back up chorus? Hard to forget. Wish I could be that enthusiastic about laundry day.” Dan’s voice trails off as he continues to stare in distracted fascination at the red mark on Phil’s ankle. Then, as if catching himself he shakes his head and closes his eyes in an effort to continue the conversation. “So you want to do what-a full on theatrical experience? A two hour special of music, bants, drama and mystery?”

“Something like that, but unique to us, unique to our story. We’d just need financial backers and the right resources to make it happen, but it’s not impossible.”  
Phil’s aware of the small white lie as he says it. With an uncertain future ahead of them, a court of vampires to contend with, Dan still vying for control over a state of mind caught between human and hunter and Phil unable to see where he could fit in enough to help, the idea of embarking on a new project, theatre or otherwise, seems about as farfetched as the idea of vampires used to be. However, it’s a hopeful distraction better than brooding about shortcomings and uncertainties. With the persistence of a latent optimist Phil decides to indulge, impossible or not, as he rambles on about songs they could develop for the stage; catchy numbers Dan could fine-tune on the piano in his room.

He’s halfway through listing ways they could integrate their videos as live interactive experiences the audience might appreciate when he realizes Dan isn’t listening to a word of the conversation. Instead, he’s studying Phil’s leg again, fixated not on the small livid bruise on his ankle but on the stolid muscle and blue veins behind the skin. He follows the path of pale skin up to where the pyjama’s creased folds obscure the rest of the leg past the knee. The direction of his gaze then shifts minutely, moving to favor Phil’s bare arms and as Dan’s stare returns to places where the veins are most prominent, twisting along the wrist and crook of the elbow, Phil begins to appreciate what it might be like to keep a lion for a roommate, never knowing when idle curiosity might be exchanged for deciding he was dinner.

In the spirit of that uneasy thought, Dan closes his eyes and inhales with the same luxuriant pleasure he exhibited when appreciating the aroma of good food.

“Let me guess, I smell like a kettle out of water again?” Phil tries for lighthearted but the words come out uneven and nervous. It doesn’t help matters when Dan slowly opens his eyes to reveal pupils dilated to wide dark circles that nearly eclipse the brown of his irises. It’s a lazy bedroom eyed gaze and Phil can’t tell whether it’s more reminiscent of lust or hunger, but he leans more towards hunger when Dan’s lips part in a slack jawed expression, revealing the points of his fangs more prominently in his mouth.

_How many hours ago since he last ate-or drank I guess would be the appropriate term. It hasn’t been that long. Has it? He couldn’t be hungry again. …Could he?_

It doesn’t seem like much time has elapsed at all, but perhaps the metabolism of a vampire just differed from a human’s, maybe it was faster, perhaps the blood he’d drank earlier had already expended itself, done recirculating throughout his system so that he needed more like a fountain with a slow leak needed to be replenished with water over time. Or maybe vampires also enjoyed a small teaser round between meals like any human enjoying a full course dinner and Dan was merely sizing Phil up as an aperitif. It’s one more detail Phil doesn’t know. Humans and animals gave cues for their behaviors, allowing others to avoid volatile situations if those cues were read in time, but Phil has little else to go on save for the uncertain darkness pooling in Dan’s stare and the obstinate hope that Dan will check himself in time before acting on the impulse to strike.

This is fangs, hunger and blood.

He remembers what Dan had said in the lounge when he’d tried to convince Phil that he was more dangerous than Phil wanted to believe and the warning from his dream drifts back to him, conjuring up the image of Dan as a more ravenous version of himself devoid of impulse control or compassion.

 _But this isn’t a dream no matter how creepy or strange this all is_ , Phil thinks. _He’s still the same. He’s still Dan._

No, he’s not. His subconscious immediately interjects. You just hope he’ll stay the same, that with time things will be alright, when you know that might not be the truth anymore, just like you’re not sure if you’re enough anymore.

Another round of self-doubt creeps back in like a bad aftertaste and Phil’s certain his pulse must be audible to Dan with how his heart speeds along in a metronomic trot.  
He tries for distraction, to think of anything else less alarming, but ends up focusing instead on Dan’s eyes and his head tilting ever so slightly to the left with the inquisitorial mien of a raptor considering a mouse. Then, Dan sets his shoulders and the bare leg laying exposed from the bed sheets bends at the knee, tensed in preparation to move.

Or pounce, Phil thinks.

“I thought you smelled like summer at high noon. Or the way the ground smells of ozone and damp after a storm. Electric heat.” Dan’s voice is low, distant, with a calm that belies how the rest of his body sets with the poise of a coiled spring, both halves of his brain seemingly fixated on accomplishing two different tasks at once- One half with idle conversation, the other in answering the instinct to test the yield of blood flow in the network of veins running down Phil’s arm.

“Electric heat,” Dan says again in a slurred whisper. His stare is denser, darker and Phil sees a clear message there in the gathering shadows of his eyes.  
_I could have been the one to bite you earlier_ , it says, _I could have been the one to have you pinned underneath me, your throat marked with my teeth and your mouth keening for more. I could do it now, could taste everything you have to give and hold you there with little effort at all. Chest to chest, blood and blood; just one bite, deeper than a kiss, because this is primal, this is lust and hunger and they say love is nearly the same. You want to empathize? I can show you what it’s like._

“Petrichor!”  
The term escapes Phil’s mouth with a force like a gunshot. Dan startles away from it as if jolting to from a dream and the pooling darkness in his eyes slows and hesitates.

“What…did you say?”

“The smell after it rains. It’s called petrichor.”

There must have been something about the word, Phil wonders, some meaning he wasn’t aware of as Dan’s body language devolves at once with a shudder from sinuous and calculating back to a tired unthreatening slump. In the next instant he’s just Dan again, soft, benign, with eyes that no longer resemble a cousin to the Wild Thing on the wall, body no longer tensed like a recoiled snake and Phil slowly relaxes. He doesn’t know if it was fool’s luck or just that Dan was still learning how to control his new instincts, but a tense atmosphere he hadn’t been aware of before dissipates from the room like a storm barely averted.

“Alright?”

Dan shudders and rubs the back of his arms despite the comfortable warmth of the room and the bed sheets still gathered by his waist.  
“Relatively,” he says and tries for what Phil supposes is an attempt at a reassuring smile, but the fangs in his mouth peek out just above his bottom lip, turning reassuring into a small threat instead. Dan notices and quickly looks away with an embarrassed cough.

“Are you…hungry,” Phil asks and this time the question is tentative, afraid of the answer.

Would you admit it if you were, he means to say, would you admit it to yourself?

Dan shakes his head. “Not exactly, but the urge is always there. Like you when there’s a packet of sweets in the house and you can’t help taking a few from the bag even if you’ve only just eaten. It’s not that you’re necessarily hungry, it’s just that it’s good and it’s there.”

“Are you saying I have a problem or are you calling me an overgrown Daim bar?”

“Both?”

Phil blinks and meets Dan’s stare. A tinge of darkness remains in his pupils, a small shadow of hunger that eddies just behind the rational part of his control and Phil’s unable to look away from it, caught between fascination and dread, wondering what it would be like to know that hunger as the predator instead of the prey.

“You are so strange.” Dan makes the pronouncement with a fond disbelieving regard and the abruptness of it catches Phil by surprise.

“Me?”

“You freak out over not knowing what to do next, over not knowing how to help, but then you just sit there and ask me if I’m alright, if I’m hungry, like I’m dealing with a cold instead of a hunger that could kill you. You know what I could do to you and it doesn’t faze you. Even though you’re worried, you look at me like I’m the tesseract, like something unusual and mildly terrifying, but also interesting and special.”

“You are.”

A conflicted look crosses Dan’s face and this time he’s the one lost for an adequate response, brow furrowed as if caught between wondering if Phil might be taking the piss or if he’s actually sincere.  
“I was joking with that last part,” he says finally and Phil’s certain if he were a vampire he’d be able to smell the skepticism on Dan like a bad musk. “You’re going to say which one I am exactly or do I take my pick?”

“All of it.” The answer is genuine and immediate. “Not so much terrifying except for when you go on about Kanye West like he’s the second coming or when you crunch popcorn kernels in your mouth like candy.”

“First off, I do not go on about Kanye like he’s the second coming-”

“No. Just like he’s the first.”

Dan ignores Phil’s comment and continues speaking over it. “It’s not as if I wouldn’t say I found one of his songs naff if it was, but he’s an influential artist with interesting ideas and a self-appreciation that’s aspirational. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in pointing that out.”

“No, no, of course.” Phil smiles and throws up his hands in mock surrender.

“And crunching the kernels of popcorn left over in the bowl is just satisfying, alright?”

“It can’t be good for your teeth.”

“Then it just gives me another excuse to visit the dentist.” Dan passes the tip of his tongue over the back of his molars and across his fangs in an afterthought. “Although, that’s not likely to be a possibility anymore. Too bad.”

“Should I send a sympathy card to the office on your behalf?”

“Very funny,” Dan replies with a smirk to match Phil’s. “So I’m terrifying, unique and special, am I?”

“Occasionally. But don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late.” Dan trails off as another thought occurs to him, quickly sobering the amusement on his face.

“You know, there’s going to come a point where we decide none of this is normal, where we stop talking like it’s just another weeknight with sarcastic banter in bed, trying to convince ourselves that everything is the same when of course it’s not and probably never will be again. We may not be able to do anything about what’s outside of our control, but we still have to deal with it. There’s going to be a point where everyone’s questions will be too much to handle because it’s no one’s business but our own, but everyone will decide it’s their business anyway. We’re just two guys on the internet, but in many ways we’re not just that anymore and we have to deal with all the implications, with all the people who want more from me than I’m willing to give before I’m ready. It’s a bit like this verse I read once from a Walt Whitman poem. Song of Myself?” Dan looks over to see if Phil might recognize the name, but he draws a blank.

“I’ve heard of Walt Whitman, not sure if I read that exact poem. Maybe back when it was assigned to us in English class, but don’t ask me to quote it.”

“Same here. I don’t remember his poems verbatim, just the feeling I got when I read them. I always liked the way he wrote in general. He never stuffed verses with prose that only a scholar with a Mensa grade vocabulary could understand. You know, he was articulate, but not complex or overbearing and Song of Myself was just like that. It’s this all-inclusive celebration of individuality, self-awareness and universal importance. I mean the entire poem is simple and powerful, but there was one line I liked most out of all the rest and the only one I can actually remember with any clarity, especially now that’s it’s more relevant.”

Dan closes his eyes briefly with the air of an actor trying to recall the precise wording of his lines, then, when satisfied, he speaks again.

“I swear I will never again mention love or death inside a house, and I swear I will never translate myself at all, only to him or her who privately stays with me in the open air.”

A brief pause follows that Phil interprets as Dan giving him time to absorb the words and see if he could understand what they meant, how the verse applied to their current situation and Phil thinks he knows exactly what Dan means. With the verse he’s reminded again of the limitations of words, how small they could be when applied to multifaceted concepts like love or death, how important and encompassing they became by contrast when shared privately between two people who could trust each other. Phil nods to show his comprehension and Dan returns the gesture.

“I always thought if I could never find another motto to sum up life, or just my life in particular, that would be enough,” Dan says. “I don’t have to translate any part of myself that I don’t care to. I know I don’t owe anything to anyone. Just to the few people I choose to obligate myself to; to you namely, but not the world at large. With all what’s happened though-it’s going to be more difficult to keep us to ourselves. Things changed well before I got blindsided by immortality in a flower shop. It all really started when we moved to London. There was always pressure on us to act and plan our next moves so we didn’t stagnate creatively or financially. We’re facing the same pressure now, only it’s more of a life and death situation than a ‘make money so we don’t end up in debt and regretting our career choices later’ situation. Just like there’s going to be more people demanding answers I don’t have or don’t want to give. Being a vampire just emphasizes a situation that already existed. I’m not saying we can’t handle it, we have to and we will, but everything’s moving along so fast and I just want to-”

He makes an empty gesture with his hands, searching for a way to explain what he meant as if he could snatch the right sentence from the air in front of him.

“You ever reach that point of oversaturation when you want to turn it all off,” he asks finally. “At least for a little while?”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“Yes, god yes. Sometimes I forget we can do that.”

“We’ll take a couple of lazy days then, it’s fine.” Phil knows they’re both aware it will be difficult to take a personal holiday at risk of interruption at any time by the present menace of vampires at their doorstep or the flood of notifications and messages from people who would protest their sudden absence, but the possibility, however remote, is one he’s willing to try.  
“We could take a lazy week. Or a Month.”  
He chances moving closer to Dan, offering his shoulder as support to where Dan’s upper body flags down at an angle, as if the effort to reel in his hunger against the instinct to taste the blood at Phil’s wrist had taken more energy than he wanted to admit.

“Just a month? How about years,” Dan mumbles and turns slowly, cheek sliding careful and cool against the offer of Phil’s shoulder. “Centuries.”

Phil slides down with him until they’re both level with the mattress. This time there’s no warning of hunger in Dan’s eyes, only a placid brown, without a hint of malice in their expression and Phil basks for a moment, mindful of the long silence between them and for once unable to care.

Dan allows the lingering observation, accustomed to the times when he and Phil would exchange a look and spontaneously enact a staring contest until one or the other’s endurance caved under a fit of laughter. This time however, Dan merely smiles and asks, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

Phil shrugs. “Because you’re good and you’re there.”

“Oh so now I’m the Daim bar?”

“If you want to be.”

Phil notes how Dan measures the reply, waiting to see if the double entendre might be retracted at the last second with a scoffing remark or if Phil might look away to ease the weight of his stare, but when Phil does neither, Dan moves forward, sinuous and slow. His shoulders roll, the muscles of his arms tense, eyes hooded over with a languorous question and when Phil continues to stare in unabashed fascination, Dan bridges the rest of the distance between them and mouths against his lips.

“I won’t bite,” he murmurs, but even through closed lips his fangs press against Phil’s mouth like braille, communicating their imperative to do exactly that.

“Too bad,” Phil mutters and catches Dan’s bottom lip between his teeth, teasing it with floating pressure, incisors ghosting along the edge just on the cusp of indenting the skin with a true bite. Dan’s surprise escapes him as a sharp gasp, taken aback by the sudden audacity, but he doesn’t move away. His mouth is warm in contrast to the rest of his body, cold and unyielding like a statue, but when Phil reaches out to encircle Dan in a locked embrace against his chest, Dan relents and goes pliant, spine wracked with tight shudders when Phil rolls his lip with another kneading bite.

A lazy dazed look crosses Dan’s face, eyes heavy lidded as if he were half drunk with love and Phil remembers an article he’d read during his earlier foray through Google about divers hypnotizing sharks into a state defined as tonic immobility. All it took was little more than a gentle caress or a prodding flip to turn them upside down and the shark succumbed to the sensation, paralyzed by whatever endorphins and electrical currents of pleasure the impromptu session of underwater shiatsu had caused. Dan is equally immobile, yet equally as powerful and capable of damage as any Great White. It’s a dangerous game. In a fit of amorous pique, drawn on by instinct, Dan could return the bite with greater force, draw blood with a simple nick from fangs longer and sharper than any human’s incisors, but Phil is too caught up in the moment to pay any mind to more caveats than he has the will to consider.

A gentle tug, another degree of pressure, and soon they find a unified flow together. Dan works to angle his face in concert with the kiss, leading in when Phil pulls away and drawing back into the sensation when he bites down, all the while cupping the back of Phil’s head with the lightest touch to bring him closer, threading his fingers through hair still mussed by the damp of the shower, the both of them utterly lost in each other.

The power of the moment seizes Phil again the same as it had hours ago when he’d held Dan compliant with his teeth and tongue bruising along the plane of Dan’s throat, drawing out strangled noises of pleasure he’d never heard before, not even when Dan played up mock orgasmic sounds for the camera or moaned over the taste of a sweet profiterole laced with chocolate garnish. At the time, Phil had been secretly thrilled at the idea of being able to elicit those sounds; that he had brought Dan to a froth of arousal with nothing more than just a touch and a bite, his mouth caressing skin paler and colder than he remembered it to be and he watches with the same rapt fascination as Dan’s body contorts back in the bowed curve of a contemporary dancer’s limbs flexed to a point of deliberate beauty as he luxuriates in the burn of Phil’s teeth dimpling his lip with concentrated pressure.

Dan’s face suffuses with a blush that fights his new undead pallor all the way down to his chest. His mouth opens in a silent cry of shocked pleasure and Phil watches with undisguised fascination as his fangs grow subtly larger in his mouth.

_Bite me._

He remembered Dan saying it before. The same plea sits on Dan’s face again, a wide eyed astonished look of yearning as if he had no idea what else to do with himself but stare and hope Phil could interpret all the things he couldn’t voice.

He hesitates at the last second and considers he has no idea where Dan’s threshold might be, Dan who liked to test his own endurance, draw out experiences to be felt in a pulsing rush of adrenaline or critically examined in languorous detail so that watching a favorite anime turned into a prolonged research project about its lore and background to further immerse himself in the story. Even arriving for an appointment became a maddening test of will for him to see how long he could draw out the minutes between getting ready and the actual arrival in expedient fashion, usually leaving Phil in a harried state of frustration as the minutes on the clock ticked closer to the scheduled appointment hour. He appears to approach making love in much the same way, so that it was never a matter of just having a ‘quickie’, or a perfunctory bump and grind to get off and get on with the day, but another challenge to enjoy the moment in detail and draw out every sensation to its maximum yield of pleasure at the expense of overwhelming him entirely. In likewise fashion, he’s lost to the kiss, sampling every pass of lips with the emphatic indulgence of a sommelier, returning the depth of Phil’s affection in equal measure and shuddering when his mouth is caught by the shocking burn of a bite, but never pulling away.  
For Dan, it’s the risk and the danger, the erotic ache of proximity, the unexpected thrill of it which excites the most interested reactions and Phil realizes that maybe in this too they’re not so different. 

Phil hesitates again, reads the plaintive request in Dan’s stare and after brief consideration, he bites down with a controlled force that draws a shuddering cry from Dan’s mouth.  
The reaction is explosive. Dan writhes with the frenetic urgency of live wires, feet slipping along the mattress, kicking the bed sheets off his legs and Phil gathers him closer to keep him from moving the wicker frame of his bed in a racket that would resound through the floorboards to their neighbor below.  
In the years of their tenancy their landlord and neighbors had grown accustomed to the separate oddities involved with filming for YouTube and their yells of victory over won Mario Kart races, although in certain situations Phil thought it a small miracle they hadn’t yet been served with an ASBO for a noise complaint. If pressed for an answer he could downplay the stranger results of filming to more mundane excuses, but he wasn’t sure he could ascribe their current exchange to a spontaneous fit of early morning aerobics.

He loses track of the rhythm of the kiss, until it devolves into an inundated blur of Dan’s whispered groans and his own intermingled in a quiet symphony of teeth and tongue and lips, words devolving into inarticulate bassive notes of pleasure. He would be content with the secure warmth of lying together under the covers, arms and legs entwined with no other agenda or purpose but to be close, to just be, without the contact of mouths and roving hands to punctuate the moment. Intimacy, he’d long since decided, wasn’t just about bringing each other to a heady state of arousal, but it’s also quite nice, he thinks, when being close was a natural lead in for something more, for enjoying the sensual heat of each other and taking a particular satisfaction in watching the other person come undone via nothing more than your own touch. It’s no different than the dalliances he’d experienced in university, to the kisses and caresses two people usually shared when being close turned into something more, but somehow it is different, deeper, better, and he doesn’t quite know why. If it was that the heat of those encounters years ago had been defined between people who he’d long since parted ways with or if the memory paled in comparison to the current passion of the moment, but then he wonders if it was merely that Dan was more inherent and incomparable to any person he’d ever met, so that everything about him, his kiss, his laugh, his wit and kindness, became a point of convergence without suitable comparison.

In the small tumult Dan shifts from his side to lie on his back, drawing Phil down on top of him and it’s only then Phil remembers how very naked Dan actually is, one line of cold pale skin pressed flush against his chest and thighs, separated only by the thin fabric layer of his pyjamas. Then Dan slips a hand under the shirt, eliminating the last boundary, fingers brushing along his spine like ice to send a shock of sensitivity racing down the back of his arms and then from his calves to his toes.

“Ah!” Phil squirms and flattens his posture to escape the cold fingers trickling along the small of his back, but Dan notices and smirks with a mischievous air in which Phil can plainly read the internal thought of, ‘oh really?’ pass through his mind. It’s the same playful defiance he adopted when asked to stop playing All Star for the tenth time while they tidied the flat or when others told him a particular shirt was too obnoxious or strange to wear so that his immediate response was to do exactly the opposite. True to form, he notes Phil’s reaction and chances another careful pass of his hand down Phil’s neck and the length of his back, following the cordoned path of his spine like a guide.  
Another involuntary hitch of breath escapes him and Dan murmurs reassurances against his ear, hands continuing to play up and down in widening circles, focusing on the space between his shoulder blades and the dipped curve at the base of his spine. Every pinpoint brushstroke of chilled fingers leaves him wracked with trembling heat until the interpolation of hot and cold, of unbearable and not enough, surges to a light headed peak

“Is this alright?”

Phil is surprised Dan can speak at all past the humming moans in his throat like separate purrs, but he stares at Phil expectantly, despite the half-drunken look on his face, waiting for an answer.

Phil says nothing, but he surges forward and the kissing bite of his mouth deepens in response, swallowing every half word and moan Dan makes, greedily devouring every sound for his own and offering his own guttural arias in exchange. Breath for breath, groan for groan, like a new intoxicating form of resuscitation. 

When he finally draws away for a proper take of air, Dan’s head falls with a soft thud against the pillow. His lips are flushed, swollen with the fading imprints of Phil’s bite and the tip of his tongue flickers out, kittenish and quick, to feel along the marks with studious interest.

“Better than a Daim bar?” A shivered laugh escapes him, voice breathless and graveled although his chest remains still against Phil’s visible heaves for air.

“Better.” Phil leans down, presses their foreheads together. “But only by a bit.”

The wide smile Phil receives in reply, the one of uncommonly bright and genuine warmth they both know is only reserved for him, makes him fizzle with an ardent kind of love he would hug to himself if the emotion were a physical thing he could reach out and hold.

“Loafe with me on the grass,” Dan mutters suddenly, “loose the stop from your throat, not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.”

“Whitman?”

“Turns out I remember more than I thought I did.”

Dan places an arm behind his head, hair spread on the pillow in a nimbus of tangled curls teased further into a voluminous riot by the shared movement of their bodies and the falling rain he’d been doused with earlier when he’d dashed outside to follow after Phil. He makes no effort to tuck any of the wandering strands back in place, apparently resigned to putting up with the careless mess of it until he was able to shower again. A vaguely feral mien still clings to him, eyes shadowed by rogue curls creating serpentine shadows around his brow, like a creature from a primeval forest, wild and inscrutable, but he also appears welcoming and affectionate in equal measure. In hindsight, it’s wonderfully strange to Phil how Dan had always been too many things at once to describe, like someone possessed of a metaphysical androgyny, rooted firmly between two states of being, at once both and neither, now at once human and not, now at once dangerous but safe, sensuous and clumsy, deliberate yet awkward, incorrigible and compassionate, his mouth answering Phil’s kiss with love not hunger.  
And Phil wonders, if Jung’s law of change was correct, if the meeting of two personalities truly was like the contact of two chemical substances where if there is any reaction, both are transformed, then he supposes just as Dan encompassed too many traits to have any one definition apply, he by association had changed as well into someone more than his own quiet misgivings of himself, more than just a boy with a fringe sitting on his bed in front of a camera, more than any one definition or term, in the same manner people would say he and Dan were alike unto one another, so that like a Janus head they were separate but so intrinsically linked as to be one and the same. Perhaps in the end that was the saving grace, Phil thinks. Their physical demarcations had altered ostensibly, but their bond of mutual trust remains immutable. It had held true despite all the changes that had followed them from Manchester to London with all its implicit upheavals and personal crises and it remained true now. The force of its presence steadies him and he fastens on to it with a will as strong and sharp as the fangs in Dan’s mouth.

He dips his hands into the thick of Dan’s hair on impulse, threading his fingers through in slow, questing circles.

“Careful.” Dan eyes him warily when one finger catches on a snarled tangle, but he allows the massage to continue and presently his eyes flutter close in clear enjoyment. His neck arches back, one long white column tightly flexing as he swallows and Phil’s hand twitches involuntarily at the sight. A strand of hair twisted around his ring finger pulls up short and yanks hard on Dan’s scalp, but instead of protesting, Dan emits a groan that peters out into a sigh.

“I’m sorry.”

“Mmm.” Dan looks at him, his blissed expression tinged with confusion as if wondering what on earth Phil needed to apologize for.

Phil tries again with another experimental tug and Dan’s head lolls sideways on the pillow with a lazy smile on his face.

“That doesn’t hurt?”

Dan mumbles an incoherent answer and Phil pauses in his ministrations to ask again.

“I said does that hurt?”

Dan twists his head against the pillow, throat working with the effort to reply. “No. Kind of. I dunno. Small pain like that doesn’t really translate like pain now. It’s…nice?” He reaches up and grasps the back of Phil’s hands to coerce them to move again. “Like a calming head massage at Toni&Guy but better. Much better.”

Phil can barely make out the last words as they burble together back into another mumble of sound, but he does as requested, hands flexing and plunging deeper into the curls, using the same patterned flow as he did for the kiss, interspersing each caress with an occasional careful twisting pull that soon leaves Dan a breathy undulating heap beneath him. His lips are parted, the delicate curve of his fangs filling his mouth and after another groaning rumble of noise meant to be a stuttered attempt at conversation he clears his throat and tries again.

“Do what you did before.”

Phil pauses. “What do you mean?”

“With your mouth. Bite. Do it again.”

Phil’s not sure if Dan is merely floating along on a complicated mix of controlled pain and pleasure or if it’s merely that an evening with little sleep and too many endorphins flooding his brain at the moment has left him mildly intoxicated so that he sounds as if he’s imbibed an excessive amount of Jack Daniels at one time, but Phil complies with a nipping kiss at his mouth and then another deeper one until the heat of Dan’s mouth engulfs him entirely. He drives his hands into Dan’s hair, twisting and grasping, hips undulating down in a gliding rhythm to match the movements of his hands until he feels nothing but the wet heat of the kiss and the cold swell of muscles moving under his. Dan’s belly pulls taut and then quivers as his spine bows and bucks upward with another resonating moan from his throat. His cold hands move up with plaintive urgency along Phil’s spine and the shivers return to course down Phil’s arms like electricity.

 _Electric heat_ , Phil thinks in a lazy stupor. _Maybe it isn’t petrichor after all, maybe it’s another name, but they don’t have a name for this and maybe that’s fine, because sometimes…sometimes you don’t need a definition for something to have meaning._

He doesn’t know what to call this. It’s the moment which matters, the heat pooling at his waist, the cold pressed along his back, the building pressure at the base of his belly and the shudders collecting into a searing peak at his thighs. It’s about Dan devouring the kiss with a greedy yearning and craning his head further into the tight yanks and strokes of the hands in his hair, it’s about the coiled dance of his hips, the steady rocking cant of his body setting its own rhythm for Phil to match; both of them lost to worries or concerns, focused only on each other to the exclusion of all else.

Then it happens.

Phil later plays the moment over in his mind, tries to understand how it could have happened, what might have triggered it, but all he can remember is pulling away, left arm passing in front of Dan’s face as he’d let go of his hair momentarily in an effort to adjust position and situate himself more comfortably. In a flash Dan had taken on a wild raw inscrutable look, as if in outraged disbelief that Phil could have stopped or perhaps alarm that he was pulling away without explanation or maybe it had just been the hunger, kept dormant long enough until Phil had teased it to the fore with his provocating bites and the unwitting offer of his arm before Dan’s mouth. Whichever it was, Dan reacts with new instincts in tow.

His head darts forward and his mouth nips at Phil’s arm like a cat issuing a warning, but instead of pulling away his fangs catch and hold, slipping into the skin with quiet ease.

_Oh god._

Phil gasps, draws up and pulls back but Dan comes with him, mouth locked to the pale underside of his arm, eyes ovoid and dark at the taste of blood.

“Dan!”

No answer. The drunken look is replaced with a fixed intent, all expression of lust or familiarity overtaken by hunger.

 _His eyes…he’s too far under_ , Phil realizes, then the pain in his arm contracts and blooms like a small explosion, spreading to his elbow with a tugging sensation as if all the nerves and fibres of tissue under the skin were being yanked forward like trees bending in a windstorm with the force of the pull Dan’s mouth exerts as he unconsciously begins to drink.

It’s worse than driving a needle into his palm in primary or crashing his ankle against a glass door. The burn of it collects into a tight vice of pressure as Dan swallows with a low contented hum and only the barest sliver of reserve prevents Phil from yanking his arm away. Before, in the lounge, the fangs in Dan’s mouth had appeared subtly curved like a viper’s meant to efficiently snag and hold their prey with the threat of dealing more damage if they were suddenly ripped out of the skin. With that in mind, he imagines snatching his arm back and tearing a furrow down the length of it, making the situation far worse than it already was.

_If I can get him to let go before he drains me completely that is._

He grips Dan’s bare shoulder with his free hand and shoves back, meaning to find enough leverage to force the clamp of Dan’s jaw to release on its own, but he’s faintly horrified to find Dan immovable like marble and just as cold.

“DAN!” This time he bellows Dan’s name without regard to the late hour or potential ASBO’s, but although Dan’s eyes are wide open, it’s a thousand yard stare without anyone home to understand the repeated calls of his name.

 _We’ve been here before_ , Phil thinks. _In a winding tunnel in the dark, back when it was only a dream and not actually happening._

Déjà vu has never been so powerful as the trailing memory of his nightmare reasserts itself with visions of Dan in the dark, of a mouth brimming with fangs meant to rend, before he’d awakened with a start back on the train with a chorus of warnings still trailing off into echoes through his head.

_Guess I didn’t have to consult Dan’s dream journal to figure out what all that meant._

The situation’s absurdity and his own fear combine like a manic cocktail to almost make him laugh aloud and with a high-pitched wail of panic collecting at the back of his thoughts, he thinks this time he wouldn’t begrudge Dan the opportunity to say he was freaking out.  
Oblivious to all else, Dan leans forward into the bite and the taste. The oppressive weight of his unchecked strength topples Phil back onto the mattress and all at once, as Dan’s tongue and mouth continue to work against his skin with relished fervor, the collective pain in his arm builds into a pleasant blanketed rush like an impending orgasm, knocking him momentarily breathless.

It’s no longer like needles stabbing his skin but like everything good and wonderful he enjoyed about sex converged into one sensation without the need for the build of foreplay or friction. It’s an unbearable tease, as if he’s being held eternally on the edge of release but held back at the last crucial second, extending the pleasure into a near unendurable fever pitch of sensation.

_Oh. That’s…different._

On a marginal level he’s aware it’s merely the bite and whatever flood of endorphins it’s triggered which are responsible for stealing away his instinct of self-preservation and replacing it with drowsy acquiescence instead, but he can’t help wondering if this was what Dan meant it felt like to drink blood. The look on Dan’s face certainly says so and Phil wonders how he can possibly stand it or if this was just more evidence for his penchant of testing his endurance, for doing nothing by halves, until he’d exhausted a situation of all information or pleasure.

“Oh god,” he says and this time panic is met with curious pleasure.

He’s not sure if it’s his imagination but Dan’s pallor takes on a faint pink-tinged hue different from a blush, suffusing his throat down to his chest as if the blood were coloring his veins as it traveled into the network of his circulatory system. Mesmerized, Phil follows its path as the flush of color expands over the contracting muscles of his torso down to the bell shaped curve of his hips, but when he reaches Dan’s thighs he quickly looks away at the noticeable demonstration of his arousal. Even though moments before he had accepted it without any reticence or disapproval, it had been expected at the time, a consensual show of ardor on mutual grounds, now however, it seems more private, an exhibited reaction brought on by something outside of Dan’s control, not meant for Phil to see.

 _Too much, too much_ , he thinks through a pall of alarm and frenetic lust. His arm is a solid line of heat and Phil stares at it in a daze as if it were disconnected to the rest of his body. Wracked tremors jolt through his limbs depositing more of the same buzzing heat through every nerve, strangling every attempt to catch Dan’s attention. Dan himself is too far gone to notice, a single minded look of rapture on his face as he stares unseeingly at Phil, peering over his arm with eyes drowned to glistening black, the very mirror image of the Wild Thing hovering in the poster on the wall just over his shoulder.

In another moment they’ll both be too overwhelmed to stop, Phil realizes and he reaches out again with his free right arm to push weakly against Dan’s chest, but the motion only provokes Dan to bear down harder and Phil’s arm goes numb.

There’s a tipping point between gods and monsters. What we become or are made to be.

The warning from his nightmare resonates with renewed relevancy and Phil is left with the startling conclusion that if he doesn’t act right now, doesn’t find some means to bring Dan back to himself in time, Dan will find himself careening over that tipping point in no time at all.

His right hand flails out to the side and catches the edge of his bed stand, jostling the glass of water he’d placed there earlier. A drop of water spills over onto his reaching fingers and instantly an idea bursts to life and he quickly acts on it with another more deliberate smack of his hand against the night stand. The glass of water vibrates and moves forward minutely before settling again. Another smack, another tentative slide forward, but not enough. 

Still too far away.

The tingling numbness is spreading to his shoulder and he doesn’t want to know what will happen if it overtakes him completely before he still has a chance to move, but it’s difficult to think and in the drowsy haze he wonders if it’s maybe it’s too late to do anything at all.

"No wonder-you can’t do it- you acquiesce to defeat before you even begin."  
Kill Bill’s Pai Mei comes to mind without preamble and Phil thinks it was strange, the things which come to mind when under duress, how suddenly an overlooked line from a movie could resurface later at a more relevant moment with greater meaning.  
This isn’t a Tarantino film and he isn’t Beatrix Kiddo locked six feet under ground in a wood coffin with Ennio Morricone’s score playing in the background over the memory of a grueling training session with a wizened Kung Fu master, but that wasn’t the point. He knows he’d never likely face off against a gang of yakuza in Tokyo or a retinue of master assassins either, but the urgency of the moment is just as critical, just as demanding for immediate action, without succumbing to hesitancy or fear. Real world problems were more difficult to surmount than a no holds barred showdown in an artful film and sometimes the resolution to those problems was never as simple as a three point punch through a coffin’s lid.  
But then again, Phil thinks, maybe sometimes the answer was as clear as a bed stand with a glass of water and a bit of resolve as fierce and indomitable as an ex assassin’s will to fight.

 _Fight_ , he thinks. _Move. If we’re both going to make it out of this, then move. Right now!_

He takes a breath, makes a fist and drives it painfully into the side of the bed stand, punching forward with as much force as he can muster.  
The impact resonates along every knuckle and this time the stand rocks with the blow. The water sloshes violently with the motion and Phil watches as the bottom of the glass turns along the edge of its circumference like a wobbling top, before the water displaces the weight far enough for it to careen over its side and onto the bed, splashing a freshet of water on Dan’s face.

Dan reels back with a sputtering gasp, eyes still wide and black, mouth open to reveal his teeth and the points of his fangs beaded with blood.

Phil pulls his arm back and a cascade of pins and needles overwhelms it immediately.

When he looks down to gauge the extent of the damage he’s surprised to see the two neat puncture wounds in his skin. He’d expected them to be larger, perhaps torn at the edges with the animalian force Dan had applied, but they’re concise and perfectly round, the classic picture of a vampire’s bite. They’re not shallow however and he clamps a hand over them as blood quickly wells up into the wounds.

Dan looks at him, the black of his eyes receding like a storm cloud in reverse as awareness seeps back in to replace it. Then he sees Phil properly for the first time, registers the way he holds his arm, the small rill of blood seeping between his fingers and realization sets in.

“Oh fuck-oh god-I’m sorry.” His voice is a rasped whisper, choked with horror. 

Still naked and flush with the dose of blood he’d just taken he edges backwards off the bed in a halting rush of limbs to get away, one hand clutched across his mouth. He hits the footboard with a jolt, makes to clamber over it despite the clear exits on either side of the bed and his feet tangle with each other at the ankles, spilling him from the mattress, over the trunk at the end of the bed and onto the floor in a jumbled heap of limbs. In any other circumstance it would have been another amusing footnote to Dan’s penchant for falling off of furniture, but the dull throb in Phil’s arm suppresses the urge to laugh as soon as it surfaces.

“Dan. Wait.” He struggles to sit up and a wave of light headedness promptly knocks him back against the headboard.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t-I almost-” Dan’s voice is muffled by the hand still covering his mouth. He scuttles backwards across the floor and hits Phil’s TV stand with a thump that nearly knocks both the stand and the TV onto the floor.

Phil tries again to move and manages to stand on shaky legs. The light from his bedside lamp spins into white circles in front of his eyes making the room career with a pitching cant to the left like a funhouse exhibit. He can’t remember if it’s worse than the time he’d been rushed to hospital after a bad infection had left him blacked out on the floor, but it feels nearly the same, nauseating and frantic. He struggles forward anyway and reaches out to grip the footboard with his other hand for support, arm pressed against his chest to keep the pressure on. When the room slows to a pause he chances another mincing step towards Dan.

“Dan, listen to me,” he says, “we’re fine. It’s fine.”

It’s not fine, he reflects. This isn’t just a case of cracking another tile in the kitchen or misplacing a portable hard drive with all their video files. This has been vital, a critical oversight with dire implications, but they’d approached the tipping point together and there was enough blame to go around without Dan assuming the bulk of responsibility.

_I drove him to the edge. He might not have done it otherwise. We both knew the risk and took it anyway. The danger was always there and this is the result, but I’m not letting it stay that way._

With one hand he gingerly picks up the bundle of bed sheets gathered on the mattress and carefully approaches Dan with another step. He’s never looked more lost and out of touch with the moment, no longer feral or wild, just mortified, hair dripping wet with water, back pressed bodily against the TV stand for support. He’s shuddering so hard the vibrations are enough to knock some figurines from their placement on the stand to the floor. He doesn’t seem to notice and the only thing he repeats over and over through the fingers splayed across his mouth is, ‘oh fuck-oh god-please-I’m sorry.”

No, Phil thinks, some problems weren’t so clearly defined in the physical guise of armed enemies in an action film. Sometimes they took the form of quiet unassuming moments like right now, with Dan horrified and disconsolate, with the both of them at the center of a problem that wouldn’t soon go away until they faced it. The chance to leave presents itself once more and he knows Dan wouldn’t make a move to stop him if he did, would probably encourage him to do so without a word of complaint. It would be natural and expected. They could walk away from each other and never look back or they could put up with the uncomfortable angst of brooding over the bite in drawn out silences, unable to look each other in the eye and unwilling to talk until discomfort and guilt eroded any remaining endurance they had to be around each other. Either method is a loss, another wood coffin of a dilemma in front of his face rather than six feet under. He could let it suffocate them both or he could steel his nerve and punch through the problem with the same measured force he’d used before.

_I’m not letting this get worse than it already is. We’re not going to sit around and wait to think about the worst of it anymore. I won’t acquiesce to defeat and I’m not going to let him do that either._

Phil stops a foot away and gently extends the bed sheets out to Dan in a silent peace offering and show of confidence. “We’re both scared here, we're both unsure, but I’m not going to run away from you,” he means to say, “I’m still here. If you want me to be. Even with what just happened. I’m not leaving you.”

It feels like being in the shed again, facing the same stifling pressure of making a decision and wondering what it would ultimately be. Time slows to a pause just as it had then, only now he’s the one making the offer to Dan who looks just as vulnerable as he’d felt when Kyle had extended the cigarette out for him to take; but this is more important than potential induction to a group of boys all trying to understand their self-worth and strengths through small tasks of bravado. It’s about staying or leaving. It’s about Dan accepting Phil’s offer of help, his offer to stay or saying no and withdrawing entirely to say goodbye.

Dan hesitates, looks at the scraped knuckles of the hand holding the bed sheets, the other arm clutched across Phil’s chest and for a moment Phil is sure he means to bolt from the room. Then Dan glances down to realize the state of his undress and the expression on his face turns to one of complete flustered embarrassment. This time he accepts the offered bed sheets unquestioningly with a tentative reaching grasp that reminds Phil of a gif he’d seen once of a raccoon accepting an offered treat between its paws with delicate care before receding slowly back into a tree trunk. In likewise fashion, Dan eases backwards with the sheets in hand and winds them around himself like a swathed robe. The top of the sheet falls around his head like a hooded robe and he peers up from underneath it without a word as if unsure of what to do or say next.

“It was an accident. Just an accident.” Phil steps away at a respectful distance to give Dan space if he needed it. “We knew the danger. We already knew it was bound to happen.”

“Doesn’t mean it should have happened.” Dan’s voice is cracked, lips swollen and stained with the drying remnants of blood. He notices and rubs his mouth with the back of his hand as if he could erase the taste and the moment with one vigorous swipe. “I hurt you. I warned you-I told you. You told me before, when I asked you if you wanted-if you wanted to become-” He stops to paw at the stain on his lips, but only succeeds in smearing it further.  
“I wanted it too much. I wanted this. Us.” He gesticulates wildly to include the physicality of the moment they’d just shared, the emotional proximity, the caress and the heat and the kiss, not so much the bite which he’d delivered without thinking. “I wanted this, but not with you as the collateral damage.”

“There’s no collateral damage. I mean, besides the obvious.” Phil presses his arm closer. “But I’m fine. It was an accident.”

“Me pushing a panic alarm under a checkout and selling an axe to a kid when I was a teenager is an accident. This doesn’t exactly fall under the same category.”

“Maybe. But it happened and we’re fine. It’s not like we can do anything about it now.”

“And it’s not we can ignore that it happened in the first place. We can’t just shove it under the carpet thinking the memory is never going to resurface to bite us in the ass again.”

“Technically it was my arm.”

Dan pauses for a beat and stares at him in apparent disbelief that he could make light of the situation at all. Phil is equally surprised at himself, but what else was there to do except to acknowledge what happened and find relief in the positive outcome rather than dwell on the worst case scenario which hadn’t occurred?

Yet, his subconscious chimes in and he shakes his head to clear the thought away.

“It was outside of our control. We’ll know to be more careful next time.”

“Next time. Right.” Dan gives a derisive laugh at the idea. “One more thing to worry about and see if maybe next time the outcome is much worse.”

“What exactly do you think we should do then?”

“I don’t know!” Dan unwittingly echoes Phil’s words from earlier and draws the sheets closer around himself. “I don’t know…I just never…wanted this to happen.”

“I know.” The room pitches again and Phil reaches behind him for the footboard to support himself, but the back of his knees hits the edge of the trunk instead, depositing him on top of it with a resonating thud. He feels slightly better sitting down and takes the opportunity to catch his breath.

“God, you really are the strangest person,” Dan says.

“What?”

“How are you that unfazed? I know I mentioned this before, but this time it’s different. I could have killed you. No hypothetical chance this time, I nearly did it. And you’re just-” Dan gestures vaguely at him. “How can you just sit there like that?”

“Because it’s you I suppose,” Phil says quietly. “It makes a difference. And it’s not as if I wasn’t scared or as if I’m not scared now. I just-I don’t know. What am I supposed to say?”

“The usual things you’d say to anyone who just skewered your arm. You know, anything short of calling in the National Guard.”

“If it were me, would you do that? React that way I mean?”

Dan falls silent. The bed sheet slowly droops off his head but he doesn’t bother to yank it back in place.  
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe not. Maybe if the situation was exactly reversed-probably not. But it’s not like I can just brush aside the fact that I’m the culprit here, I did this to you. It’s not like I can just hit a switch and stop agonizing over it.”

“I thought you’d established ‘freaking out’ wasn’t exactly your style.”

“I’m not freaking out,” Dan mutters. “I’m strenuously contemplating

“Looks a bit different from here, but maybe it’s just the blood loss.”

The beat of silence returns, this time with an air of lighter humor hovering at the corners of Phil’s mouth threatening to curl into a smirk which he can see Dan struggling not to return, but then a fresh jolt of pain stabs its way past his arm and he quickly turns his face away to hide the reflexive grimace. Dan notices however and a renewed surge of guilt makes him struggle with the makeshift cocoon of bed sheets, at once making as if to rush forward and check Phil’s arm and at the same time recoil back as if he’d like nothing better than to hide away. The conflict of interest makes him pulls the sheets tighter around his shoulders with one clawed hand, but in his haste he exerts too much strength and it tears in his grasp like paper with a jagged ripping noise like a fart that’s too comically rude in the silence.

They both stare at the torn fabric in his hand, at the long frayed seam which opens up down the entire length of the sheet effectively rendering it useless at covering anything ever again and then back at each other.

The absurdity of it all, of Dan dressed like a poor imitation of a swami in his awkward casing of sheets, the abrupt flatulent-like noise of it tearing in his hands, Phil slouched on the trunk with a drunken tilt to his body, hair in chaotic disarray and pyjama bottoms slung low across his hips like a bad attempt at sagging, conspires with their mutual panic to make an otherwise grim situation hilarious instead.

Dan snorts and raises a hand to his mouth to cover it up, but when Phil tries to hide his own snicker of amusement, they both break out into full gusts of laughter, aware that on its own there was nothing inherently funny at all about coming so close to the brink of no return, to the point of nearly destroying each other, but in abstract, it was too absurd, too wild and ridiculous not to laugh at.

 _Maybe it’s just exhaustion making everything seem funnier than it is_ , Phil thinks. _Or just an overdose of adrenaline with nowhere else to go now that everything’s resolved and we’re safe, but I’ll take it._

The pain remains in his arm, the small wetness of blood against his fingers slippery and uncomfortable as he continues to apply pressure, but they’re alive, they’re laughing and they’re okay and he prefers hysterical amusement over looking down at Dan in a bundle on the floor, staring at the middle distance with wide haunted eyes in silence.

Dan rises with halting care to a standing position, still chortling laughter, water dripping from the ends of his hair as he approaches Phil cautiously. He keeps the bottom half of the sheets wrapped securely around his waist, while he tears loose a scrap of the upper portion draped across his shoulders, turning his custom aesthetic from swami inspired robe to roman philosopher’s toga.

“Here.” Dan motions for Phil to hold out his arm and with only a small hesitation he does. Dan receives it gently, almost reverently and they both study the wound together, quietly observing the two small circles rimmed with blood and the dried flaking bits of red stains painted in swathes on his skin. It’s not bleeding as freely anymore, but without further comment, Dan carefully winds the sheet around the arm in a firm cuff.

“I don’t know if a plaster would be enough to help in this situation and we don’t exactly have gauze wrappings in the house,” he says when he finishes tying off the ends of the sheet. “We should probably buy some. You know- not because I’ll do this again,” he amends quickly, “but it’s useful to have around. You should also disinfect that later…bacteria and all that.”

He keeps his hand on the scrap of sheet wound around Phil’s arm without looking up at him, applying gentle pressure with his fingers.  
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I’m sorry.”

No poetry from Dan now, no literary references to ease the moment into an introspective, philosophical context, just the stark reality remains, just the both of them as it had been from the start, to cope and make sense of their lives on their own terms together.

Phil places a hand on top of Dan’s and applies his own reassuring pressure. “I know, but we’re fine. We can learn from this and remember so we don’t make the same mistake again. We’ll be more careful.”

Dan nods, unable to say much more and Phil quickly tries to find another subject to focus on.

“One thing I do have to say though…” he trails off with meaningful emphasis and Dan stares at him expectantly, the silence filling with tension. “You look ridiculous.”

Dan casts him a withering look, but he welcomes the attempt at humor with a quirked smile.  
“Excuse me. You look as if you were just on the losing end of a fight with hair gel and Siouxsie Sioux’s hairstylist.”

Self-consciously, Phil pats the top of his head to feel the protruding mess of his layers dried into asymmetrical points sticking up at odd angles. “Maybe I could rebrand my style. No more fringe. It’s backcombed spiky hair from now on.”

“Thought you tried that look in university already. You know the picture you showed me one time where you looked like you were going through a Sid Vicious phase.”

“Better than your 90210 beachcomber phase.” Phil shoots back with a smirk.

“Yeah alright,” Dan concedes, not so eager to reminisce about his early teenage years and his first introductions to tanning and hair straighteners. “At least neither of us ever went in for the bovver boots and trouser braces combo.”

“It’s not exactly the 1960’s anymore either,” Phil points out and Dan laughs, keeping his hands on the scrap of sheet around Phil’s arm. The moment passes and he sobers slightly, fingers no longer bearing down to stop the wound from bleeding, merely rubbing the surface idly with his thumb and forefinger.

“I was thinking…” he says slowly, “maybe this is our new normal. This whole thing. Where we play at being two people living together in a house like I’m not a vampire and you’re not the worst temptation. Like some kind of bad drama.”

“We’re not playing at anything. We’re dealing with it. We survived.” Phil doesn’t add the descriptive ‘barely’ he knows is running through both their minds. “Normal’s relative anyway isn’t it?”

“If you’re about to go on about normalness leads to sadness, I swear-”

“Well, doesn’t it? You never liked the idea of going along with what you thought you were expected to do because it made you frustrated and unhappy. Now you’re doing something else completely unexpected and you’re happy. At least-” Phil hesitates. “Are you happy?”

Dan doesn’t immediately respond. He focuses with silent concentration on the wrap around Phil’s arm instead, tracing the same circled path with his fingers and Phil wonders if maybe he’d been too presumptuous. Being content with having a better career than the law degree he’d become disenchanted with didn’t necessarily equate to happiness; it didn’t mean he was happy with the way things were or with who and what he had become. It was why Phil had decided early on never to jump to conclusions in applying a labeled term to anyone before he had a chance to understand them better, before they had a chance to clarify for themselves exactly who they were or how they felt. Living alongside Dan for so many years however had made him feel in some ways as if Dan were an extension of himself, so that they coincided on certain thoughts and ideas without the need to elaborate further as they both implicitly understood what the other meant, almost as if they’d come to share not only a house and a career but an empathetic point of view. Happiness however, Phil had come to understand, was entirely subjective and individualistic and he couldn’t rely on their natural ability of concurrence to say Dan was happy when he might not actually be at all. Even with everything Dan had said before- his conviction to stay at Phil’s side, his apologies now-none of that meant he was happy. It meant he might tolerate events for the sake of survival, see the conflicts through to their natural resolution, but being happy about it was another matter entirely.

Then Dan looks at him and a tentative smile overtakes his mouth, seguing into a confident gesture of appreciative warmth that appeared only when Dan was well and truly content.

“Yeah, I think I am,” he murmurs. “If you’d asked me a few years ago-” he shakes his head without finishing the thought. “I don’t know, but right now, even with this entire mess…"  
He releases Phil’s arm and slowly takes his other hand, studying the scraped skin over the knuckles, before giving his fingers a gentle squeeze. “I don’t know fuck all about what’s going to happen now or what will happen to us later, but I’m not sorry we’re here. I don’t regret it. The current situation is mad and intense and I’m still scared about it, but I’m not sorry about being here. Take away the worry and the fear and yeah…I’m happy.”

After another moment he realizes in a self-conscious bout of awareness that Phil’s hand is still clutched in his, that he’s unwittingly stroking the inside of the palm with his fingers and he lets go with some reluctance. “Just promise me you won’t bring Daim chocolate anything back to the house ever again.”

Phil laughs. “What? It wasn’t so much like a Daim bar then?”

“No.” Dan turns his head away and speaks in a murmured aside. “It was better. Richer. Just the heat of you, like strong, sweet liqueur.”

“Oh.”

Phil isn’t sure what else to say to that. It was provocative enough to say you liked the smell and feel of someone in bed, but to say they tasted like liqueur, especially when the one saying it was a newly turned vampire, it’s like an exotic and strange new form of come-on. He wonders briefly if this was what it had been like between Buffy and Spike, a relationship that was more like a pulse racing challenge to understand where innuendos and danger converged or ended, always at the razor edge of want and need. But theirs had been something too unbalanced to be tenable for the long term, an accord fed by past feelings of hatred and desperate confusion until at the end, when circumstances had changed with the potential to become something better for both it had been too late. What he shared with Dan was healthier by comparison, just as risky, just as fraught with danger and unknowns, but offset by compassion and mutual affection.

 _Maybe in the end_ , he thinks, _that’s all it has to be about._

“It’s getting warm in here isn’t it?” Dan frowns suddenly and shifts the bed sheet off his shoulders. “God, it’s so hot.”

“Not really. I’m comfortable.”

“Are you actually serious? It’s like an oven. Feels like my arm is…burning…up...”  
Dan trails off and they both pause at the same time to notice the curling white smoke lazily trailing up from Dan’s arm like a signal fire. Then, in unison they turn to peer at Phil’s window where the sunrise is seeping over the roofs of the buildings opposite their house in a line of clean yellow white brilliance that pierces between the blinds and lands directly on Dan’s shoulder, moving slowly to encompass his entire body in an effulgent burn.

“Oh god.” Dan jerks back against the TV stand and this time the television on top rocks precariously, almost spilling to the floor along with a cascade of figurines and books.

“Wait-!”

 _Wait for what_ , Phil thinks as soon as he says it, _wait to see if he turns into the equivalent of an indoor firework?_

The sun spills through, dousing his room with light and Dan ducks to the floor as if dodging artillery fire. He moans with pain, crawling stiff limbed across the floor to hide behind Phil’s bed, his back hunched and shuddering against the sunlight. The flimsy covering of the bed sheets do nothing to protect him and with horror Phil can hear the hiss of the burn on Dan’s skin like droplets of water flicked onto the hob after the flame was turned off.

_What do I do? What do I do?_

The sun continues to spill through in a golden square of encroaching light growing with every passing minute and he knows soon not even the floor will be a safe haven against it. One idea pops into his head and he seizes on it without a second thought. He darts forward and yanks open the door of his room before gripping Dan by his shoulders and hauling him up to wrestle him out into the hall. His skin is hot even through the bed sheets, feverish to the point of boiling and it’s all Phil can do to touch him without being burned himself.

“What are you doing? What-?!” 

Dan’s cry of protest is cut off when Phil bodily shoves him through the doorway of his own room, back into the muted darkness of his blockaded windows choking off the sunlight through the closed blinds. The bed sheets tangle around Dan’s legs as he totters forward into the safety of the shadows and he falls to the floor with a thud like a felled tree before Phil can catch him.

“Sorry.” Phil winces.

“Mmmpf.” Dan makes a noise between a groan and a whine, curling his way across the floor towards his bed. He clutches the duvet and twines it in his hand, seeking enough purchase to haul his way onto the mattress, but he falls back, too weakened with the lingering burn scalding his skin. Every move elicits another strangled moan and he finally collapses against the edge of the bed, chin resting on the mattress, eyes closed as if resigned to stay in that position until Phil approaches and places a hand on his shoulder.

“Can I…?” He leaves the offer of help open and Dan nods wordlessly. Phil sets his feet and slides his hands under Dan’s arms.

Lift with your legs, not your back, he remembers his mother’s word of advice to him over the phone after moving into their London flat in which they’d spent weeks unpacking boxes and hauling more up the stairs. Dan wasn’t a shipping box, but Phil thinks the method should work either way. He straightens his hips, bends his knees and with a quick inhale of breath grabs Dan the rest of the way off the floor and deposits him onto the bed. He lands with a bounce in the middle of the bright green and yellow duvet and lets out another pained cry, but he wastes no time in burrowing under the covers like a bear set for hibernation. After a moment he stills and Phil is left staring at a motionless heap on the bed.

“Dan?”

Silence. Just the receding hush of the burn fizzling out into the quiet and the distant sounds of London coming back to life with the morning.

“Can you hear me?”

The bundled collection of the duvet twitches and Dan’s head peers out again with a bleary eyed regard.

“Are you alright?”

Dan nods and shudders out a yes, voice rasped as if the sun had pierced through to the inner lining of his throat. “It hurts…but it’s better now. Thank you…I’m just…tired.”

“Okay. Then I’ll just-” Phil points to the ajar door and turns with the intention to leave, but Dan suddenly calls out and he pauses to look back.

“Wait, what are you going to do?”

Phil wonders the same thing. It’s been the one question keeping him up all night, refusing to let his mind rest, but this time he supposes maybe the answer is simpler than he thought it might be.

“I’ll wait for you,” he says. “I’ll be here.”

The chuff and roar of a bus starting its rounds drones past the road, along with the rest of the incidental warble of the city bristling into motion with the rising sun. On any number of paths and streets through London people would be making their way towards schools and businesses, towards cabs and trains, each of them caught up in their personal vortices of problems and triumphs in evidence of a world spinning on without regard to any of them, but for Phil the world was other, something outside of their own isolated purview and he thinks nothing is quite so important as the moment right here, in the gentle pause of the room with Dan settling into the bundle of his duvet, smiling at him with calm acceptance.

“Alright. I’ll see you later.” Dan’s eyes begin to shutter close, his voice waning out from fatigue, but he offers one last word of caution before he succumbs. “Just be careful…and disinfect that. Remember.” He nods weakly towards Phil’s arm.  
“Be careful,” he says again.

“I will

Satisfied, Dan relaxes back into the cavernous bundle of bed linens gathered around his body and after a few moments longer the room segues back into silence, the shadows gathered round in a pocket of safe refuge until the evening returned and Dan could emerge once more.

With that, Phil takes his leave, closes the door and looks out into the long stretch of the hall to face the rest of the day alone.

### ❧❧❧❧

_What do I do now?_

With the frantic events of the past few hours over and the intensity of adrenaline waning away he’s left wondering how best to fill the time until the evening arrived again.  
The flat looms out in front of him, filling slowly with the sounds of construction companies resuming work and the rumble of vehicles joining the morning rush of London traffic. It’s a day like any other where he would most often begin with a trek to the kitchen to inspect the cupboards and the fridge for whatever was most suitable for satisfying his craving for breakfast in the morning. He’d grab plates and mugs meant for two people in preparation for another set hour of viewing the television in the lounge before getting on with the rest of the day, but Dan’s absence suddenly renders that idea null and void.

It wasn’t as if he couldn’t manage by himself, but he had established a rhythm together with Dan, a fixed pattern of breakfasts in the lounge, of browsing laptops on the sofa, of discussing plans, reviewing schedules and conferring with one another about where they would be and how they meant to spend the day, either individually or together. Now Phil is struck with the sudden realization that where on certain days when Dan was poorly and holed up in his room to rest or out of the house on a personal errand it was only a matter of time before they would eventually end up bumping into each other’s presence throughout the day once more to resume their routine as usual. Now however, the daytime hours would be Phil’s alone to sort out for himself in the wake of Dan’s new nocturnal lifestyle. It’s a small but palpable rift that makes it seem as if Dan is separated from him by miles of distance rather than merely sleeping in his bed one room away.

With the crisis averted it’s as if he’s right back at the start of the evening wondering just what he was meant to do next, how to help, how to manage his time properly before whatever near disaster cropped up again once the sun dipped below the horizon.

 _Might as well take care of the most pertinent issue first_ , he thinks as his arm throbs with the reminder of Dan’s fangs piercing the skin. _Hope someone remembered to buy TCP last time we were at Tesco’s._

He idly wonders if there was any real danger from a vampire’s bite besides the obvious implications of having one’s blood drained entirely. In some stories a victim of a vampire bite usually turned into a mindless revenant of a creature, not quite a vampire, but no longer human and little better than a zombie. He doesn’t feel a deep-seated itch or the feverish heat indicating the prelude to viral infection, only a residual ache as if he just had an I.V line taken out of his arm, but still he wonders if there was any inherent danger he needed to worry about.

_No, it’s probably not as bad as all that or else London would have turned into a live action re-enactment of 28 Days Later by now. Maybe it’s just like a Gila monster’s mouth. Just filled with loads of venomous bacteria that you need to clean out of a bite before it kills you._

His memory flashes back to their kiss and he pulls up short halfway to the bathroom. 

_Oh god, then again I hope it’s not like a Gila monster._

He makes it a point to clean his arm thoroughly at the sink, rinsing clean the dried blood before fairly dousing the wounds with antiseptic. The immediate sting makes him flinch backwards and it’s another near miss for his ankle to bang against the edge of the open door. The burn thankfully recedes after a few minutes of clenched teeth and he relaxes. With the wounds no longer bleeding freely to need the secure wrapping of another clean scrap of broken bed sheet around his arm, he sets about applying a set of plasters over the area in a crisscrossed pattern.

 _No dizziness, no more lightheadedness, I don’t feel like I have a fever…so that’s good. I hope._ He glances at his reflection in the mirror and gauges the rumpled state of his hair and the delineated marks of exhaustion under his eyes.

"Sort yourself out, mate." Dan’s sardonic voice floats up from his subconscious and he decides with no other real plan of action in place it’s the most salient advice to take.  
The next hour floats by in a procession of teeth brushing, face cleaning and hair styling as he tries to at least bring his physical appearance back to a semblance of normalcy, before heading to the kitchen to prepare a bowl of cereal to eat and bide his time.

The memory of the bite, the kiss and Dan ensconced in his room continues to dog every step and the feeling of urgency seeps back in, the vague sense of hurtling on into an unknowable future with no real plan of action and no practical skills he could apply to help.

[ _No time, no time._ ]

 _No time for what_ , he wonders. Whatever else was bound to happen would happen, regardless of what he did, but the sensation continues to haunt him as he crunches the cereal in his mouth while sat on the sofa idly watching the news. His attention waxes and wanes throughout each segment, not paying mind to any of the reporters on the screen and when his mouth closes around an empty spoon he looks down in surprise to notice he’s finished the cereal in the bowl without having realized it. He’s too grounded in the uncertainties worrying at his thoughts, furrowing his brow with the frustration of being held in check with a mixture of fear and indirection. It makes him want to do something, anything to abate the sensation, the way he insisted on investigating a strange noise in the flat until its source was discovered.

 _Leave no stone unturned, no question unanswered, especially the important ones, especially if it had to do with someone important. Leave nothing to chance.  
Sort it out_ , he thinks again, but he can’t and he worries what that will mean for them both when events came to a head.

Phil looks down at his arm and the collection of plasters covering the evidence of Dan’s true potential. They’d been careless, ignoring the consequences of an instinct Dan could barely control and he finds it a small blessing that the damage hadn’t been greater. Dan could have easily broken his spine in an unwitting fervor and if it hadn’t been for the glass of water on his bed side table…

The thought trails off. There was no need to examine the obvious. It had been luck of the draw alone. Nothing in Dan’s stare had been remotely recognizable as human. There had been nothing to speak of for his personality which was defined by cunning and wit and kindness, only a base atavistic response which couldn’t be reasoned with, operating on the terms of a cold efficiency with the initiative to placate its hunger without regard to familiarity or affection. The only thing which had dissuaded it had been one glass of water and the pure luck that it had been enough to startle Dan back to himself in time. Nothing more.

With such odds, what was left to sort out when you were only human, when there was nothing humanly possible to do? It was all well and good to say he’d wait for Dan, that he would be here when the evening returned, but what use was it when the same dilemma presented itself once more as soon as Dan awoke to find a lack of fresh blood in the fridge to satiate his thirst, with only Phil as the most convenient option in the flat?

 _I could get more_. The idea occurs to him in an instant. _Dan said the other vampire, Teague, brought the containers to him from a butcher’s shop, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get more. I could buy a fresh supply and have it waiting for him when he wakes up. It’ll give me something else to focus on instead of just sitting here feeling like I’m quietly losing my mind._

His laptop offers up the alternate option of browsing through it for other pertinent concerns which needed attention, like the barrage of e-mails and social media notifications waiting to be picked through, but he doesn’t have a mind to check either, already sure he would encounter the same running theme in both: You have a job to manage, social responsibilities to comply with, people you need to reply to, endorsement opportunities you need to review- along with a list more of other matters that wouldn’t wait until he decided their personal crisis was over. For the moment however, in light of extenuating circumstances and the need to embark on an exotic grocery run, he decides the online world can wait. 

_Besides, a change of scene would probably be good for me. Maybe that’s all I really need to do right now_ , he thinks. _Go outside._

It had been another maxim advocated by his mother when he was a child. When a situation felt stagnant, when you needed a better perspective, when you felt tempted to close yourself off and away, when all else failed, sometimes it was best to try and just face the world and go outside.

Committed to the plan, he switches off the television, interrupting the reporter mid-sentence in her briefing about continued police activity at Lambeth Bridge and after quickly depositing his empty bowl in the kitchen sink and selecting an ensemble of customary black jeans and a colorfully printed shirt, he grabs his jacket off the banister and heads down the stairs, keys in hand, determined to make the best of the day.

Before shutting the door to the flat, he pauses and listens to the settled silence in the hallway. It’s a strange, empty atmosphere and he wonders if he’ll ever get used to it, if one day the quiet would become another part of their routine.

They had made radio shows and a YouTube career part of their expected norm despite the overwhelming odds and even if this was far different from learning how to operate a sound board or brainstorm a video, maybe in the grand scheme of things, if they could survive the Night Court and navigate the learning curve of a deadly instinct, it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to create a new norm for a future they could approach together. Phil wonders if Dan would think him twee for believing that, but he finds he’d much rather focus on a scenario where the outcome was more positive than the alternative.

Resolved on that point, he closes the door and sets the lock, before heading down and out into the streets of London proper.

After the previous day’s thunderous deluge it’s a shock to see the vault of bright blue sky overhead and the sun streaming down as if he were in the middle of Santa Barbara and not merely in Central London where sunlight was more of an anomaly compared to the ever present threat of rain clouds which usually loomed over the city. He squints up into the light and takes a breath. The smell of rain still lingers in the warmth of the pavement as the sun dries up the last remnants of last night’s storm. It’s a deep earthy scent, sharp and good, without a true equivalent for comparison.

 _Petrichor_ , he thinks. _The smell after it rains. Ozone and electric heat…_

“No cabs in the sky, son, only here on earth if you’re looking for one.”

Phil startles and looks back down at the curb in front of him to see a cab pulled over with the passenger side window cracked and the driver’s rough bearded face leaning over to address him.

“Alright?” The driver raises his eyebrows, waiting for an answer and Phil quickly collects himself.

“Ah, yes, fine. Sorry. I do need one actually.” The words spill out in a rush as he reaches for the door and clambers into the back passenger seat. Public transportation would be too crowded at this time of day, too full of determined grim jawed commuters who would cheerfully murder anyone for stalling more than a second at the ticket barrier. Vehicle traffic wouldn’t be any better, but given the choice he’d much rather opt for the soft, cool interior and peaceful discretion a cab offered instead. Once inside, it takes another few moments of the driver eyeing him with silent bemusement in the rear view mirror before he realizes he hasn’t given a destination.

“Sorry, I’m…not exactly sure where I’m headed yet. Just one second.” Flustered, he quickly fishes his mobile out from his jacket pocket and does a quick search for an appropriate Butcher shop. Where places for Chinese food, fish and chips and boutique goods are abundant, butcher shops in London apparently are few and far between, but his eye is quickly drawn to one in particular with an incongruous name and he quickly gives the address to the driver.

“Er-The Ginger Pig, Moxon street.”

“Oh aye? Been there myself plenty of times,” the driver says as he pulls away. “I tell you, best sausage rolls I ever had came from there. Big as your head. Good pork pies too.”

“I’ve never had a pork pie before. I’ve had mince pies though. When I was a kid I used to think they contained actual beef.”

“With a name like that, who’d blame you?” The driver laughs and glances at Phil in the mirror. The second time he does it, with a lingering scrutinous regard, Phil clears his throat pointedly.

“Have I seen you somewhere before?” The driver squints before focusing his attention back to the road. “I never forget a face, even with this job where everyone starts to blur together. You look familiar to us. Can’t place you as one of my fares though.”

“I do video production for Youtube, so maybe online?” Phil gives the answer by rote. He had been asked about his profession so frequently over the years he had finally devised a way to avoid the discomfort of explaining what exactly a ‘YouTuber’ was meant to be to skeptical people who most often came away from the conversation more nonplussed than they had before. Video production was a neater descriptive and usually met with a vague impressed nod of the head before the conversation inevitably moved on.

“YouTube?” As predicted the driver scrunches his face with mild incomprehension. “Oh, I know what you mean. Not much for that site myself. Just for recaps on the match and the odd funny dog video. Don’t remember seeing you on there.” The driver wags his finger and shakes his head trying to jog his memory. “Can’t place you, but I know I’ve seen you. The way you talk though- there’s a fair bit of northern in you isn’t there?”

“Actually, yes. Rossendale originally, then I lived in Manchester for a bit.”

“Oh aye?” The driver instantly perks up, excited to have finally hit on an accurate guess. “A fellow Mancunian! What are we then? Red or blue?”

Phil has a moment to realize the driver isn’t asking about his favorite first generation Pokémon game, before his heart sinks at the impending football discussion looming over his head.

“I er-don’t really follow it. At all.”

“Not following it? ‘Ave a word with yourself!” The driver becomes the very picture of offended, chin drawn up and dark brows drawn together in a severe line. “You’re on the YouTube you said right? You could be the next Andy Tate. Maybe not as big as he is, but there’s money to be had in commenting on matches. Would do us some good to have one of our own out there in the field talking about it rather than those lot from out of town. Got to have some local pride, man.”

Phil sees the determination in the driver’s face, notes the intake of breath in preparation for another comment and mentally steels his endurance for the one sided conversation about technicalities and league colors he already knows he’ll barely be able to follow along with.

“I’m red through and through.” The driver proudly flicks an air freshener in the shape of the Manchester United crest hanging from the rear view mirror. “Terrible season this year though. We’re almost staring at a relegation if it doesn’t turn round soon. Not sure anything can save it now except if we can snag the FA cup, but it’s looking grim either way. Can’t even praise Martial anymore. Everyone keeps sayin’ to give him time, he’s young, has potential, but we don’t need potential, we need actual results, good talent that’s on par with the club’s history. Maybe we shouldn’t keep looking back on old glories and the like, but I’m telling you, Ronaldo was a _legend_!” He slams the steering wheel for emphasis, blipping the horn accidentally and Phil jumps in his seat. “A right legend, man! There’s talk he could come back, so why not dredge up the past, especially if the present is in such a piss poor state. Just look at what Coutinho did.” 

As the driver’s effusive assessments of players and managers drones on into a complicated soliloquy of plays, trades and contracts, Phil wonders if lucid dreaming states worked even when one was still awake so that he could mentally project himself to anywhere else save the cab’s interior.

_Maybe there’s a sports anime like the Free! equivalent of the World Cup in England I could watch to at least give me something more to go on whenever someone tries to test the extent of my knowledge about the game. Or maybe I should have just brought my headphones._

He’s drifting along with the flashing scenery passing by the window in a sea of shop fronts, pedestrians and idling London traffic when the driver pauses in his run-on conversation to address him again.

“You’d make a fair good player yourself what with your stature and all. You play any?”

Phil wonders what the driver’s reaction might be if he confessed to miming a broken toe in school as an excuse to avoid P.E sessions involving wet football pitches and groups of other boys more eager and headstrong to kick the ball than he was. Instead he settles for shaking his head without elaboration, certain that even if he were interested in learning how to play, football and other rigorous sports related pastimes were not the most advisable recreational activity if the bruise on his ankle from simply banging it against the edge of the bathroom door was any indication.

“Too bad. Knew a bloke in school with your height, had the other team constantly on the ropes whenever he got going. Used to pick his fair share of fights too. Liked to mix it up with the players even if they were on his own team. ‘Course he was from Newcastle, so there you are. You like a bit of the rough stuff too?”

“Uhhmm…” Phil looks to the side uneasily, unsure now if the surreal conversation was actually happening or if it was just a vivid fever dream he might be experiencing.

The cabbie glances at him in the mirror and laughs. “Nah, you don’t have the face of a scrapper. Not much for arms either are you?” He flexes a bicep for emphasis and wags his eyebrows.

Just as Phil contemplates the pros and cons of having taken public transportation instead of a cab, the driver continues. “Just as well probably. There’s already too many people with an eye for brawn and nothing to speak of for brains. You think strength’s all you need to get by in this life and it turns out when all’s said and done, it doesn’t matter if you can weight lift 200 kilos or come out on top in a pub brawl, what matters is how you deal with all the rest you can’t solve with a fist. Which is damn near all of it. You understand?”

Phil absentmindedly rubs the knuckles of his right hand still aching from their contact with the bed side table and with some bemusement he thinks perhaps there were certain instances where a fist was a more than adequate solution to a problem, but he just smiles and nods assent, grateful to have touched on a part of the conversation that doesn’t revolve around football.

“In this job I see all sorts passing through. Tourists, business types, uni kids-all trying to get by and get on with it the best they can. It’s difficult out there.” The driver nods towards the window and Phil understands he means to indicate not just the immediate street they’re driving on or London itself, but the greater expanse of every town and country beyond its borders.

“The world can be a right terrifying place to live in sometimes and you think there’s nowt you can do about it and maybe you can’t. Just one person against life’s unknowns and all the bad stuff we do know about? Enough to make you cower in your house and never leave. But you know what I think- no one’s inconsequential, doesn’t matter how little you think you have to offer or how little people say you have to offer, no one’s useless. It’s a fucking fact. You’ve got to come as you are, like that Nirvana song. When you make an effort to connect with someone, make them feel understood and centered in the world- _That_ means something.” The driver smacks the steering wheel again as punctuation.  
“The rest can figure itself out from there. ‘Least that’s the way I see it. The greatest impact you can leave on a person just takes one word, one small effort. My mum always said as much. The smallest actions matter, without all the grandstanding nonsense of bravado and trying to be something other than you already are to get in the way. It’s a small thing, but it’s those small things that matter. You can’t live without affecting the world around you no matter how hard you try to keep away from it. So you might as well affect it positively and enjoy each day as you can, as you are.”

The driver squares his shoulders and gives a harrumphing cough. “Just one cabbie’s long winded opinion of course.”

“No, no,” Phil quickly responds, “it’s a good opinion.” And a relevant one, he thinks as he remembers his earlier crisis of confidence in wondering if being simply Phil Lester was really enough to weather all the changes they now faced. “I suppose it’s difficult to see yourself as someone who can affect anything positively when there’s so much going on and just one small word or action doesn’t feel like a good enough response.”

“It’s all about the effort, man. That’s all a person needs.” The driver nods to himself. “Hell, I’m blue collar, last rung on the ladder for some people who have caps and gowns and I still made it alright. You’ve got your high paid doctors what know how to diagnose a cancer cell off an x-ray everyone else missed and I couldn’t do that if you paid me a million quid to, but I’d bet just as much money they couldn’t manage a career in what’d you call it? Video production. Just because one of you is trained to save a life and you’re not doesn’t mean you don’t have as much to offer. Then you’ve got your real world problems that no degree or profession ever prepares you to handle and you have to make do with what you can. We’re all floating along here with the best and the worst of us and we need to figure out how to survive and be nothing less than who we are.”

Phil smiles. “You know, maybe you should consider doing a vlog for YouTube. It could help motivate people.”

“A what now?”

Oh right.

“Er-like what you said Andy Tate does?” Phil hurriedly searches for a comparison the driver could understand. “But instead of commenting on the game, it’s more like a commentary on your life, your experiences, for people to see online.”

“People watch that?” The driver takes a moment to think as the car slows for a red light. “Nah, it wouldn’t come natural if I talked to a camera. Better when it’s between people like you and me now. Anyway, I know what I’m good at. I take people where they need to go and help them get on with it. If I can pass along a few words they needed to hear at the same time-so much the better. It’s the small things, like I said.”

“Hold on. What’s happening now?” The cab coasts to a sudden halt despite the green light ahead and the driver frowns as a fusillade of honking horns trails up from the line of cars stopped in front of them. A few drivers poke their heads out of the window to see what’s wrong and yet a few others abandon their vehicles entirely to lean against the bonnet with their arms crossed and a desultory look of resigned frustration stamped on their faces.

“Ah, damn. With all these cars bottlenecking the road and everyone stood on the pavement watching-has to be another accident. Had one just like this last week, where a bus decided to dance with a lorry and we ended up sitting in traffic for three hours. We’re likely to be stuck here for the long haul.” As the driver says it, the nasal wail of a siren drones from somewhere further up the road, closely followed by three others. “You want to wait it out or take a walk?”

Phil consults his mobile again and sees that he isn’t too far away from Moxon Street. It would only be a matter of a brisk walk past Regents Park and he’d be right there. The day is bright and uncommonly beautiful by English weather standards and he thinks it might not be such a bad idea to enjoy the rarity of it outside the dark interior of a car.

“I think I _will_ take a walk actually. Thanks.”

“After that storm we had last night you’re better off appreciating the sun out there, rather than stuck in this mess,” the driver says as Phil rummages in his wallet to pay the fare. “And watch a few United games when you can. Local pride- remember.”

“I will.” Phil quickly hands over the money before the conversation can turn towards football again, although he thinks it might not be so bad to occasionally brush up on a few games and see if he might not find a way to, if not enjoy it, then at least appreciate it. If only to avoid the awkward rift of a one-sided conversation every time someone launched into a recap of a game as if he knew every term and player by heart.

“And thanks for having the patience to listen to an old cabbie’s nonsense.” The driver hands Phil back the change. “I know most passengers just want the ride, not some bloke talking their ear off.”

“No worries. I think…I think I needed to hear a bit of that today if I’m honest.” Phil exits the car and with a last parting goodbye to the driver he closes the door and sets off towards Regents Park. Before he’s made it very far however he hears the driver call out from behind him. 

““I remember now!” The driver’s face sticks out the window and he points at Phil excitedly. “You’re the one from that car insurance advert! During the Christmas holidays years ago-that was you! Told you I never forget a face.”

 _Never going to be able to escape that particular fifteen minutes of fame_ , Phil thinks as he waves in acknowledgement of his first television debut and a hairstyle he’d rather forget. _Should probably change my twitter bio to ‘that guy with the hair from YouTube and that one confused.com advert.’_

He sets off again, past the bumper to bumper traffic in the street and on towards the open green expanse of Regents Park ahead where it seems like the rest of London not stuck on the tube or corralled in traffic have decided to converge on the park en masse, filling the paths and lawns with crowds of tourists and families all enjoying the pleasant turn of weather. It’s been longer than he can remember since he last enjoyed a casual walk through any of the green spaces in London’s center. In the past, he and Dan had dabbled with the idea of jogging through the park, but they’d never dedicated themselves to the routine and only engaged in sporadic bursts of it throughout the year so that walking past the lush gardens now seems more like more of a spectator sport than it should be. The flowers have riotous colors, planted in beds that have become overrun by offshoots of cross pollinated seeds, escaping the boundaries set for them by park managers to trail a little beyond their designated rows in evidence of nature in a wild, uninhibited state, free to express and create itself at will and he feels a brief kinship with the idea, the same way he’d engineered his own channel as a means to escape hindrances and be free to create a small universe of his own. They’re only flowers, normal abundant mixes of perennials and annuals, no different from a garden in any other part of the world, but in his mind frame he accepts them as the small unassuming encouragement they currently appear to be. Having come so close to the point of no return imposes a new sense of appreciation in him and although he’s impatient to collect what he needs from the butcher before evening falls, he decides he has enough time to enjoy his unexpected detour, floral metaphors and all.

He continues to walk down the path, taking his time in observing the placid sights of the park, mindful not to become too lost in the moment or else risk falling over a small child or colliding with a lamppost.

_I’d probably have more luck stepping on a bird really_ , he thinks as he skirts around a flock of pigeons, more of them milling about the tall grass and flowerbeds while ducks and geese warily idle by one another like roving packs of gangs forced into reluctant proximity for the sake of the breadcrumbs thrown by passerby. A few lithe limbed herons without a taste for bread or the occasional crisp, elegantly pick their way through the crowd to find solitude on the waters of the boating lake instead to snap up a better meal in the form of whatever unfortunate fish or dragonfly happened to pass its beak. Not many of the birds venture into the lake however as much of the water’s surface is dotted with small platoons of pedalos commandeered by families drifting along their way while avoiding the imperious glare of swans who honk a warning when a pedalo encroaches on its designated territory. As Phil watches, another swan, completely undaunted by either watercraft or people, gives chase to a couple who begin to furiously peddle away with the swan honking out its indignation behind them. 

_Just needs the Benny Hill theme and it’d be perfect_ , Phil thinks as the pedalo and the swan continue on down the water and out of sight.

The entire sight of the park with its lush landscape, blue skies and calm vibe, feels like one collective sigh of relief. It’s a different perspective, a welcoming contrast to the last few hours which had left him battling a crippling sense of self-doubt and impossible truths. It’s like a private holiday without ever having left the country, a small reprieve from greater concerns that allows him to think and enjoy the day for what is was exactly as who he was.

“Phil?”

The voice is tremulous and young with an eager pitch to the question at the end of his name and he knows before turning around it will be another viewer who has recognized him. True to form, two girls stand behind him on the path, the one who had addressed him smiles ear to ear and the friend next to her hides an equally wide grin behind the palm of her hand, both of them shocked and pleased to have run into him on the street. It’s no small thing to mirror their smiles and extend his own greeting in return. It’s become second nature after so many years to turn and say an automatic hello upon hearing his name spoken outside of close friends and family from people who recognized him from his channel.

_I’ll take that any day over recognizing me off a car insurance advert._

The girls approach as one and it’s the usual formalities, a quick pause to ask how are you, to say thank you when they tell him they love his videos, and another second more to give photographic evidence of the encounter in the promise of a selfie he sees looming in the mobiles in their hands.

_How flustered do I look right now_ , he wonders as they line up their phones for the shot. He takes a quick halfhearted swipe at a lock of hair tickling low over his eyebrow before leaning in and down to compensate for their shorter stature and he smiles just before the shutter gives an electronic wheeze to announce the completed photo op. They hesitate before taking their leave, exchanging a single glance between them and Phil already knows the question they’re about to ask before they can say a word.  
“Where’s Dan?”

 _Currently recovering from a brush with spontaneous combustion_ , is his immediate thought, but he says, “Oh, he’s at home. Probably editing.”

The answer seems enough to satisfy their latent curiosity and with another quick hug and another flash of their smiles, they continue on their separate ways. As their excited voices trail off in the opposite direction Phil wonders again just what he might have looked like in the picture, if too harried or tired or washed out from a bad angle of sun in his face, but he was sure either way their selfie would inevitably crop up in a mention on twitter or tumblr, by which time it would have been pored over by thousands of followers who wished they had been in the right place at the right time, offset by a few thousand more who would assess the weight of his mood by the number of lines on his face. It’s of little concern to him now. Just as he’d discussed with Dan he knows there were certain things which would always escape his control. Better then to focus on the small aspects of his life he was still able to manage.

It’s nice however to think of how bright and animated the girls had become on seeing him, enthused enough by his videos to have taken the time in allocating him to a spot of familiarity and fond admiration. They’d accepted him as nothing more than he’d portrayed himself to be, a boy making sense of the odder happenstances of his life with every self-defined quirk and bit of strangeness in tow. It was a small thing as the cabbie had said, something largely dismissible and easily overlooked by the eclipsing nexus of war ravaged countries and large scale tragedies suffered around the world every day, but here in London, where he could only be concerned by the immediacy of his own circumstances and environment, it’s enough to think he could affect an individual in such a positive way, to make them happy merely by virtue of recognition and affinity for the videos he produced. It was this same unquestioning acceptance and comprehension Dan had exhibited on first meeting him, approaching every strange facet of his personality as only part and parcel to his nature with the understanding that strangeness itself was ubiquitous and if it didn’t harm or threaten others why bother trying to hide it? Phil had thrived on the encouragement and in time their mutual comprehension of the other had gone on to form the main core of a connection now threatened by a transformation which defied comprehension itself.

_On its own having that kind of bond doesn’t mean anything. We’re no different from any other pair of close friends who enjoy each other’s company, but it is different. To me. It’s important. I don’t want to lose that. Not now. Especially not now._

_Fight_ , he thinks again, for both our sakes. _Don’t concede to defeat. Whatever happens next, whatever I do, just fight. However small the effort seems._

A duck waddles up to his foot and startles him from his determined reverie with a low demanding quack as if to say, “either feed me or move because you’re blocking the path, genius.”

“Sorry.” The word leaves his mouth by fault of instinct before realizing he’s addressing a waterfowl with no concept of apologies or the English language. A woman jogging past spares him an amused glance when she overhears and he quickly steps to the side with a cough to continue on his way. The duck quacks again from behind him with a distinctly intonated sound Phil can only describe as affronted disdain.

_With my luck it’ll probably stalk our house for revenge later._

He walks the rest of the way down the path and out of the park without further disturbance by either viewers or ducks as he continues on towards Moxon Street. He’s halfway there when he passes a small nondescript restaurant front and a delicious waft of smells from its open door overwhelms him, stopping him in his tracks.

It’s unbearably good, full of an unfamiliar but savory aroma that entices his appetite with a burbling rumble from his stomach, reminding him that although he was set off to solve the matter of Dan’s hunger he still had his own to contend with. The minimalist awning of the restaurant, a deep verdant green with white lettering advertising the restaurant’s name as simply ‘Pho,’ provides no hint about any specialty of cuisine Phil recognizes. There are a few tables arranged outside behind a small screened barrier and customers are seated comfortably, bent low over arrangements of food on their plates that he still can’t place other than to describe it as something hot and steaming and delicious if the smell is anything to go by. He’s well and truly hungry now, but strange food always gave him pause. It was difficult sometimes to look at a restaurant menu and order against the grain of what he was already accustomed to enjoying, especially when it had to do with cuisine he was entirely unfamiliar with. The aroma drifting from the restaurant however coaxes his hunger with the promise of something different but good. ‘You won’t know unless you try,’ another maxim of his mother’s comes to mind with a compelling incentive for him to bottle his hesitation and go in and just order. It was just food after all, he reflects, not a contractual lease with dire consequences if he decided he didn’t like the taste.

Dan by contrast was consigned to one taste forever and Phil briefly imagines what it might be like if he were a vampire as well, closed off from any food source except for blood. No more sushi with its pickled ginger atop fresh yellowtail or salmon on a bed of a sticky rice, no more cereal sweet and crisp, no more pizza or spaghetti Bolognese. No more soft pancakes drizzled with honey or syrup, no more chocolate hobnobs or any manner of sweets. Chinese, Indian, Greek-all the varieties of gastronomical flavors and textures he currently relished would be diminished to one taste for eternity. He’s not a vampire and he’s not sure the plan is to become one anytime soon, but at the hypothetical thought of losing the opportunity to enjoy the food he could eat as a human with a more varied diet than blood, he decides it might not be such a bad idea to indulge.

 _Try new things_ , he thinks and goes inside.

The piquant aroma within the restaurant becomes more potent as soon as he steps through the door and he fairly swims his way through it to the back of the queue lining up for the counter. The interior design is as minimal and simple as the awning outside, with black tables on a white tiled floor and a few large potted ferns to break the scheme with a dash of color. There’s nothing else by way of décor however to hint to the theme or style of food the restaurant serves and he hopes the displayed menu on the back wall might demystify what he can expect to eat here, but after a few moments of searching over the menu items he finds himself at even more of a loss.

 _What is a…Bún bò Huế_ , he wonders. _Bún chả? Bún ốc? Am I even pronouncing those right??_

The only food he’s able to recognize have their English equivalent printed on the board as Pandan waffles and banana cake, the first of which he would order in an instant, but his appetite urges him for something more filling than a breakfast type confection, but he has no clue what anything means. He’s lifted his mobile from his jacket pocket to consult Google in a frenzied bid at research before his turn to order arrives when he overhears two women on line behind him murmuring about him in discreet tones. Phil glances up and can just make out their reflections in the gloss coated surface of the menu board.

“Oh-oh that’s him. I wasn’t sure at first, but it is.” A woman in a blue jacket excitedly taps the shoulder of her friend, a woman in a coordinated pale yellow dress suit with short flouncy hair and a pinched expression on her face.

“Who now?”

“It’s a person my daughter watches on YouTube. Phil, from Dan and Phil?”

“The Everly brothers? I thought they were dead."

“No, dear. _Dan_ not Don.”

“Oh.” The woman in yellow sounds unimpressed by the clarification. “Who are they again?”

YouTube? A website for videos my daughter watches. They record skits- small narratives of their lives in an entertaining manner-I suppose it’s hard to define really. When I asked my daughter to explain she laughed and said there wasn’t a way to describe it other than some kind of ‘internet cult with cat whiskers.’”

“A cult?” The woman’s friend looks alarmed now and clutches her purse across her chest with a determined grip as if she might just march out the door straight to Downing Street to announce a public safety risk in the form of an online group with an affinity for cats.

“It’s a turn of phrase they have, dear, it’s not actually a cult. It’s all very benign and inspiring. You have these people with careers creating all manner of videos online that have a mass appeal to the young generation. And the old if you count that I enjoy watching as well. It’s interesting if you ask me.”

“Hmm.” The woman in the yellow suit looks off to the side, making no effort to disguise her disconnection from a subject she no longer has any interest for, as if the very idea was too base to even consider.

“Oh, I have to ask him for a quick picture. If my daughter knows I saw him and didn’t she’ll disown me.” Her friend merely nods in a manner to suggest, ‘what is it to me then?’ and Phil watches in the reflection on the board as the woman in the blue jacket approaches with a tentative touch on his arm.

“Excuse me, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but you’re Phil? The one from YouTube?”

“That’s me.” He turns and smiles.

“My daughter won’t stop talking about you. The first time she went on about you I thought you were a close friend of hers until she showed me your videos. They’re quite lovely and entertaining.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“I have to say, I think you’re the only one to have convinced her to pursue a career in film without ever having met you. She was in the medical field originally. Our family has such a line of doctors she felt she needed to keep up tradition, but when it turned out that wasn’t for her she decided to try what you did with a film degree, and oh- what a turn around. She was like a completely different person. So much happier.” The woman beams appreciatively. “At the moment she’s working as part of a production team on a small film. It’s all very exciting for her and for us as well. It’s as if you gave her a new perspective I’m not sure she would have considered before.”

For a moment he flounders for how exactly to respond. The rote answer of a smile and a simple thank you which he usually gave in the casual setting of a meet and greet event with too many appreciative viewers to form more concise replies for seems too trite of an answer here, but he tries his best to show genuine gratitude for being hailed as an unexpected source of inspiration.  
“That’s so nice to hear I could help in some way. It’s good to be happy with whatever you choose to do in life and it really is a great career. I don’t think I would have been as content doing anything else. I’m glad she’s enjoying it.” A warm sense of contentment seeps into his skin as he says it and he thinks, ‘ _small things, small efforts..._ ’

“Would it be alright to snap a quick picture with you for my daughter? I want to send it to her when she gets back to her flat. Although, she’s liable to drop the phone as soon as she sees the message.”

Phil laughs and just as he had done with the girls in the park he leans down and in to pose with the mother who gives an exuberant smile as the phone in her hand snaps the shot.

“Oh, she’ll love this.” The woman studies their picture before replacing the phone back in her purse. “Thank you so much and sorry again to disturb you. I don’t make a habit of accosting people like this, but I just had to say hello.”

"No worries. And the best of luck to your daughter.” 

As the woman takes her place in the queue alongside her friend, an urgent afterthought makes him quickly turn back to her with a question of his own.  
“Er-sorry, just one thing-” he hesitates, his phone screen still lit up with a fruitless Google search about the menu items on the board. “Do you know what kind of food exactly they serve here?”

“It’s Vietnamese cuisine, but their main specialty is the same as the name of the restaurant.”

“Pho?” When he says it the woman smiles and shakes her head.

“Oh no, dear, that’s the way I said it the first time I saw the word, but it’s pronounced as ‘fuh.’ My daughter always said they missed a prime opportunity in calling the shop ‘Pho King.’"  
She raises her eyebrows meaningfully and Phil catches onto the wordplay in an instant with a stifled laugh as the woman’s friend looks on with a displeased expression.

“The pho they serve here is quite good although you can find other shops by the same name all over London, but none of them are affiliated with each other.”  
At Phil’s confusion the woman continues to describe the dish. “It’s a type of broth based soup-very good and filling. Has a bit of everything in it, sour and spicy, sweet and salty, with cuts of chicken or beef depending on which you’d like. They serve the southern style here which tends to be a bit sweeter than the northern- more greens in this one as well.”

She goes on to direct his attention to a few other items on the board. “I recommend the bánh rán while you’re at it. It’s a type of deep fried pastry sprinkled with sesame seeds and very nice crunch to it. They serve it with a vanilla syrup for dipping. I usually go overboard with them if I’m not careful. There’s another type of pastry they do here which is incredible. You can see it right there-bánh patê sô? It’s a type of pastry like a pork pie, only hot and much better. Even better than the ones they have at the Ginger Pig, but don’t repeat that too loudly outside of here. You have some purists that would pillory you for even suggesting that.”

The woman’s friend appears to be one such type of person as she listens along to the conversation with increasing disapproval.

“And if you’re going to drink anything with the pho, go with their lemon or coconut water. Or even a soda is fine as long as it’s something cold and sweet. My friend enjoys hot tea instead, but I find it too much with the soup.”

“Thank you, I think I have a better idea now,” Phil says as the queue moves closer to the counter. “Not sure if I can pronounce all that well enough though.”

“That’s alright. If you keep at it, it’ll become second nature in no time. It’s the effort what counts, dear.” The woman gives a little wave of goodbye again and rejoins her friend in line as the person in front of Phil finishes his order and moves away.

“Er-a bowl of southern style pho please,” he says haltingly at the counter, “and an order of...bain-er-” he points at the word for the sesame pastries the woman had described as he falters around the pronunciation.

“Bánh rán?” The employee finishes the word for him with a practiced flourish of a rhotic trill and Phil nods gratefully.

He orders a lemon water as suggested and it arrives in a tall glass frosted over with chilled condensation. He immediately takes a sip and finds it to be as cold and sweet as it looks. The cashier offers the assurance of free refills should he need any later and after he pays he steps away from the counter to watch the other customers to see what he needs to do next. The rote process appears to be placing an order, taking a seat and waiting for the meal to be brought to the table. Phil looks around for a place to sit but the only spot left available is a small grouping of stools situated along a raised counter against the display window where other diners sit elbow to elbow as they eat. It’s not the most ideal arrangement and he’s almost resigned to putting up with the claustrophobic setting when, through the window, he spots a table outside which is empty and he quickly makes his way past the crowd to take it before someone else sits down.

He reaches it in time and relaxes into the chair, lips still pressed to the straw of his glass as he savors the water in prolonged sips. The sky is still blue and clear, the sun still shining with the unprecedented intensity of a Californian afternoon and across the way a boy in a striped shirt and black jeans is playing a violin in a cheerful fast paced pizzicato, the velvet lined case at his feet open to collect the tips from the small crowd gathered around him. It’s a lively soundtrack to a beautiful day and the boy’s enthusiasm is infectious, lifting Phil’s spirits further as he watches. After a moment he angles his phone to record the performance and show Dan who most often appreciated the buskers around London, pausing to watch them on the occasions when they were out together on an errand or traveling to the BBC offices. After he’s saved the video however, Phil wonders if it was a wise thing to do, if showing Dan would only make him resentful and quietly envious that scenes like this were lost to him, the way he could now only enjoy daytime activities and pastimes through secondhand experience.

Before, he had imagined the possibilities of being a vampire in a detached furor of a daydream, but now, basking in the cool breeze of the day and the sun overhead, enjoying all the sensory experiences that a vampire could not, he has a chance to truly consider the implications. Maybe somewhere on the internet clips of sunrises and sunsets were traded like rare jewels between vampires, rated for their colors and vistas like an alternate version of metacritic, while being pored over with wistful expressions of longing and nostalgia. Enjoying the day in person was far different from enjoying it on a screen, just as attending live concerts was always an adrenaline charged euphoria different from watching it in the muffled safety of a lounge without the frenetic energy of the crowds and the bands on stage thundering through the speakers to give it better context. Maybe for Dan this was how things would be now. He was immortal, impervious to injury or disease, filled with newfound power and speed, but not without a degree of loss in the bargain, where perhaps being reminded of all the things he could no longer partake in or enjoy on his own terms during the day would not be welcome.

His finger hovers over the delete icon and he looks back to the boy skillfully weaving his fingers across the strings in a blur of speed and sound, his upper body swaying along with the rhythm of the music as the crowd grows around him. There’s a quality of rare goodness in the moment, a transient nature to the boy and his song and the crowd enjoying the music in rapt awe that might not soon repeat itself tomorrow, a mundane kind of magic that lasted only as long as a person stopped to listen. It’s something different than the troubles they currently faced, a reminder of beautiful things, of the possibility of redemption and hope in human nature even when one might not be strictly human anymore. It’s a good and necessary distraction and Phil decides to keep the video at the last second of deleting it. He’d be the diurnal archivist from now on, cataloguing whatever small incidental joys he managed to come across for their mutual enjoyment and allow Dan to say whether he appreciated the effort or not.

His food arrives as he continues to listen to the solo concert and he turns back to see a large steaming bowl of soup set in front of him complete with a basket filled with balls of sesame seed pastries in deep fried shells of golden brown batter. The waiter places a set of wrapped chopsticks and a spoon on top of his napkin and bids him to enjoy before setting off to tend to other customers.

_It looks…amazing._

He can see cilantro and vegetables interspersed with cuts of beef swimming in the broth and the smell wafting across his face is the same aroma which had accosted him on walking past the restaurant, only with a more concentrated potency that sets his stomach to burble another encouragement for him to begin eating. But as soon as he unwraps the chopsticks and picks them up, he encounters the problem of how exactly to hold them.

He risks a few studious glances at the other diners to see how they’re getting along with the task and is somewhat dismayed to see a family with two small children all scooping up noodles on their chopsticks with quick-fire proficiency. Another person lifts the bowl to his mouth and nosily slurps with unselfconscious gusto, a chorus of relishment joined in by various other diners who’ve finished the main parts of their soup to enjoy the rest of the broth without using their spoons. Apparently, it was just customary when drinking pho to sip the remaining broth from the lip of the bowl as one would enjoy a good drink. Phil’s not sure he might be able to imitate them as a nagging sense of propriety gives him pause against doing the same, but his bowl is still brimming with food that requires the use of chopsticks to enjoy and he struggles on with them in various configurations of dipping, twisting and pinching, but he’s unable to snag anything more than a few noodles that promptly slither back into the bowl as soon as he raises it to his mouth. He tries again, arranging the chopsticks between thumb and forefinger, squeezing them forcibly to keep them in place and darting them down into the bowl with another pinching downward arc, but he misses and the chopsticks dance apart from each other in his hands, the ends skittering along the bottom of the bowl with a rasping shriek of scratched porcelain.

_Right. I’m doing this._

He grips them again, his face screwed up into a determined scowl and he jabs at the noodles floating on the surface like the heron he’d seen back at Regents Park stabbing at the water with liquid speed to catch an errant fish, but the only thing he accomplishes is an impressive splash up of warm liquid into his face like a contained explosion. Spluttering and beyond frustrated now, he quickly reaches for a napkin before someone can see and thinks he’ll just eat the sesame seed pastries and be done with it.

“You’re pretty shit at this aren’t you?”

He jerks around with the napkin still pressed to his cheek, to see a girl standing behind him, dressed in faded grey coveralls like a mechanic, an expression of bemusement on her face as she balances a bowl of pho on the plate in her left hand. She appears nearly the same age as him, with plaited russet hair coiled around her head without attention to style as if it were meant only for the deliberate efficiency of eliminating any wayward strands from dangling in front of her eyes. Despite her observation of his chopstick skills the grin on her face looks well-meaning, not mocking and as Phil watches she extends another pair of chopsticks out to him from the ones on her plate.

“I understand what you’re going through- thought I was going to impale my hand the first time I tried it myself. Maybe give these a try. They’re really meant for training someone how to use them properly until they get used to it, but when my hands aren’t feeling up to par I usually ask for this type instead of the regular disposable ones when I come here.”

“Oh, thanks.” Phil reaches for the chopsticks and finds them joined at the top with a flexible piece of red rubber that prevents the sticks from sliding apart in his hand.

“She means they’re training chopsticks meant for kids. How old are you again? Need a bib as well?” A man sitting at an adjacent table, dressed in the same pair of coveralls as the girl, leans over to address Phil in a stage whisper and the other two men seated at the table with him, all dressed similarly, laugh as the girl leans over and thwacks him on the shoulder.

“I still remember that old dirt bike you had with the training wheels on it if you really want to start, Brent. I could see if you had bad knees, but looks like you just had bad luck getting that bike to sit up straight. Or was that a metaphor for something else?”

The other men hoot with laughter and raise their glasses in a toast towards Brent whose face turns a neat shade of beet-like as he takes a large swig of the beer bottle next to his plate.

With an air of nonchalant victory, the girl places her bowl down and takes a seat at the table with the other men. “A bit below the belt that-literally- but they can get out of hand sometimes. They’re not terrible, they just like to mess around and we’re on our break right now, so you know how it goes.”

“It’s alright.” Phil lifts the chopsticks, genuinely unperturbed by the comment, only eager to get on with it and have a proper taste of the food in his bowl before the smell drives him to dunk his head in the broth and eat it that way instead. This time when he tries, the chopsticks effortlessly gather a fair amount of noodles, vegetables and meat along the ends and he brings the large helping to his mouth quickly before it has a chance to fall back into the broth.

Maybe the past twenty four hours spent in a heady state of heightened emotions has lent some of its own flavor to the food in his mouth, spicing it with the relief at finally being able to sit down and enjoy a proper meal without the threat of some new catastrophe hovering in the wings to appear, but as he chews he wonders about the consequences of dunking his head in the broth anyway to enjoy it better by way of complete immersion. The taste is just as good as it smells and the warmth curls its way down his throat and blooms in his stomach, instantly quelling his appetite’s demands for something to eat. Just as advertised, he encounters a mixed array of flavors swimming in the broth- the spiced piquancy of flaked chili pepper, the crisp snap of cilantro and bean sprouts, the subtle sweetness of the broth and the rich melting pliancy of the meat-all of it intermingling to create a taste that is surprisingly good despite his prior reservations.

“It’s great, right?” The girl looks at him expectantly, her chopsticks poised before her mouth with the same gathered bundle of noodles and meat.

"Yeah. Very actually. Thanks again.” He raises the chopsticks in a small salute and she returns the gesture with her own chopsticks before dipping them back into the bowl to retrieve another bite of food. Phil makes to say something else, but he pauses and his stare lingers on the dark splotches of grease streaking the girl’s arms and down one side of her neck like swatches of thick black paint. She notices and follows the direction of his gaze, before laughing.

“Yeah, I’m a mess. Comes with the territory of being an engineering mechanic. That’s also why I have to use those chopsticks sometimes. My hands tend to get the brunt of it when I work.” She holds up the back of her hands for demonstration to show the scarred and reddened surface of her knuckles. “I was working on an Agera that broke down in the middle of the morning commute earlier. If you were stuck in that traffic you can blame the customer with enough in his pockets to make Richard Branson blush and not enough common sense to actually pay for proper service for a car he broke the bank getting in the first place. I ended up drawing out sludge from the engine that looked like what’d you get if you dropped a vat of peanut butter into curdled chocolate milk.”

“Oh.” At the mental image Phil makes a face which she mirrors.

“So now I have to flush the whole system and then change gaskets, filters-the whole nine. It’s a sorry state for a car like that to be in, but it pays well so I can’t complain.” She takes another heaping mouthful of food and shrugs.

“So what do you do?” She nods her head at him and through a chewed mouthful of food Phil once more gives the standard answer.

“Video production for Youtube.”

“A YouTuber you mean?” She perks up. “You a beauty vlogger?”

“What-no, no.”

“Well I figured someone that beautiful had to be giving out tips about their secret.”

Phil coughs around the food in his mouth and struggles to prevent a dribble of broth from escaping.

The girl doesn’t notice or pretends not to and continues. “I’d probably try my hand at it if I didn’t have a foundation made up of engine fuel most of the time. I like motorcycle vlogs best though. Maybe not so much the ones with random commentary, some of the guys can be right dick heads-” Brent overhears and interjects with an “oi!” in a mock affronted tone to suggest him as a member of said motorcycle vlogger/dickheads, but the girl ignores him.

“I’m more about the bike specs and the scenic aspect. Some of the riders I’ve seen use mounted cameras on their helmets and along the sides of their bikes to get different angles of the landscape they drive past. I always thought if you could pair a bike with good film equipment you could make for some beautiful cinematography. Especially as I’ve always liked astrophotography- you know, those amazing time lapse shots like the ones I’ve seen this guy on YouTube do-dakotalapse- with amazing footage of star trails and the Milky Way. I’d wanted to do something similar, but with combining astrophotography and motorcycles instead. Kind of a travel- space documentary-daily vlog- type channel. Even thought I could call it Galaxy Rider.”

“Princess Leia here,” Brent chimes in and raises his bottle in another toast of reverent amusement before turning back to address the others.

“I think you should try it,” Phil says and means it. “That sounds original and different than what everyone else is doing. You’re already half way there with the concept, why not go ahead and realize it.

“You’re a love. I tell this motley crew and they tell me off for it.” She jabs her thumb at the group of men seated with her, too embroiled in their own conversation now to overhear. “But they might have a point. It’s a bit _too_ different isn’t it? Not exactly what people go on YouTube to look at.”

“Sometimes people just share very common interests when it comes to what they like and it gets reflected on social media where people go to see and discuss more of the same, but that’s not to say they might not like trying different things as well.” Phil raises the chopsticks in example. “This is my first time here and I don’t regret the experience. Just because it’s not common doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.”

“Well, maybe, but I just thought it sounded a bit strange.”

“Strangeness is a good thing.”

The girl smiles and her expression becomes one of reflective musing. “You know, I have a friend like you, a bit older- Well more than a bit, but you’d never know it to look at him. He’s the same as you- the kind of encouraging influence who won’t let me say no to a good idea. Years ago he helped me out of a bind I was in and he’s the main reason I’m where I am now.” She laughs and adds, “I guess it was more than a bind really. I used to be a car thief.”

“What-Really?” Phil pauses with the chopsticks halfway to his mouth.

“Yeah. I used to like the rush of it, stealing into other people’s cars, figuring out how to bypass the alarms systems and rushing off with it before anyone noticed what I was doing. You really want a challenge, you head down to Chelsea to see how best to run off with some nouveau riche hotshot’s Aston Martin.” The smile on her face broadens at the memory. “I can’t say I didn’t have fun and the spare parts sell for a song if you know which models the market is hot for. I did alright until the fuzz caught up. Then I didn’t do too good at all. Then I did worse. I was in a bad way and too stubborn about being in the hole I dug for myself to think about getting out of it. When you’re like that, pushing people away or making them leave you alone because they can’t stand to see you destroy yourself, it’s hard to reach out for help when you think nobody wants to anymore. Then my friend came along, like I said, and he helped, even with me being in the state I was.”

She takes a thoughtful drink from her glass of lemon water. “I probably would have wasted the rest of my life being a bitter hard arse in a holding cell turning off every solicitor assigned to me if some good advice didn’t help me look at things more objectively and turn all that know-how into fixing cars instead of stripping them. It’s just funny the way some people pop into your life and say exactly the thing you didn’t know you needed to hear at the time. Then you end up in a better place than you’d thought possible, all because of one conversation, because someone believed in you. D’you know what I mean?”

He considers Dan, thinks again of what they had told each other between the tempered heat of presence and trust and he thinks yes, he understands very well what it means to believe in someone; what it means for them to believe in you. It was possible when available options seemed limited to create your own options, to answer self-doubt with creative solutions and find independence and confidence without the need for anyone else’s validation, but it was better by far when someone could understand and help you see yourself for all that you could be, for all that you are, especially at the darkest times when it might be impossible for you to see it yourself. He thinks of how Dan had leaned forward in the soft shadows of his room and said, “You, just as you are, has always been enough. The same way it’s enough for you that I stayed, it’s enough for me too. Just you.” And Phil thinks again, yes he understood how a single conversation with the right person could be so vitally important.

The girl appears lost in her own thoughts for a moment before she asks, “you drive?”

“I don’t. That is I don’t own a car right now.”

Or maybe ever, he thinks as he recalls his early driving history involving close calls with shrubbery.

“Oh, I was going to say you could bring your car down to our shop and we’ll take a look at it for you, pro gratis, for encouraging my weird idea. But living in the city, it’s probably better you don’t drive. There’s plenty of other ways to travel that don’t involve rush hour traffic hell. I’d do the same but I used to rely on the northern line to get around and the problem was, between all the service and construction delays, I never got anywhere at all. So I figured I’d much rather be stuck in a car than on a carriage packed in like sardines with everyone else. If you do get a car one day, promise me you’ll change the oil and not let it turn into grimer’s cousin?”

“I’ll make sure the Pokémon stay on my ds not a car engine.” As soon as the words leave his mouth he winces internally at the flat joke, imagining if Dan were here how the expression on his face would resemble outright exasperation, but the girl only laughs.

“I have to be getting back to the shop. Still have to deal with finishing up the Agera before I leave for the day. But it was nice speaking with you-uh...” She looks at him expectantly and Phil quickly catches on.

“Oh, it’s Phil. And likewise…er-” He flounders for her name in turn.

“Ah, sorry. It’s Susan."

He’s nearly tempted to ask if her full name is ‘Susan 2,’ but quickly realizes that the small inside joke would only be between himself.

“Well, I’m off. And I’ll consider what you said about the YouTube channel thing. Who knows-maybe it’ll be successful. It’d help me mix things up a bit anyway.” She leans over to deliver another thwack to Brent’s shoulder to call his attention. “Let’s go you lot. Things to do.”

“Alright, boss, easy.” Brent rubs his arm, feigning mortal injury, but he looks at the other two men and signals for them to prepare to leave.

“Hey, take care.” She waves a goodbye to Phil and he waves back, watching as the group file out onto the pavement and down the street.  
The waiter shortly returns with the offer of a refill from a pitcher of more lemon water and Phil takes the time to finish his meal, opting for a spoon to drink the rest of the broth instead of the traditional method of drinking straight from the bowl and once done, just as the woman earlier had described, he’s so full he feels as if he might just roll his way off the seat and back home like a human boulder. The sesame seed pastries are still present and accounted for however and he decides to take them to go in a small paper bag, munching on one idly as he sets off again down the pavement towards the Ginger Pig with the lilting music of the violin trailing after him.

If he had felt at a loss ordering in the restaurant before, he feels even more out of his depth stood before the counter in a butcher’s shop where everything is arranged with clean and delicate efficiency, knives and spices lining the walls in neat rows, slabs of meat hung behind the clear glass freezers for customers to note the freshness and precision of the cuts and the customers themselves place their orders with the casual air of having done all this before, ordering briskets and tender loin like seasoned chefs. Ordering cuts of meat however was different than ordering blood, a much less common request, and Phil wonders just how to phrase what he needed as he watches a man, one of the butchers Phil assumes, dressed in a signature black apron to match the shop’s awning outside and muscled arms as if he not only cut huge slabs of meat but bench pressed them as well on his off time, approach with a notepad ready to take his order.

_Now what? Do I order it like a keg of beer?_ Phil thinks quickly, unsure how exactly to ad-lib this particular situation. _No, Dan brought home small containers-like pints. Right. Maybe that’s it. I’ll just need to order a pint._

“Alright?” The man smiles, noting the hesitant confusion on Phil’s face. “First time here?”

“Yes, actually,” Phil says with some relief that despite having the roughened face of a Hells Angels biker and the toughened physique of a boulder, the man appears pleasant and patient enough to tolerate newcomers like himself who might not have a clue how to order. “The thing is, I need…blood. Pig’s blood.” 

He says the last in a confidential undertone, already aware of how strange it sounded to his own ears, but instead of reacting with confusion or disgust, the man lights up as if Phil had just announced Christmas had arrived early.

“Ah, what’s it to be then? Sanguinaccio dolce? Morcilla? Boudin noir?”

There’s a level of expectancy in the man’s voice, an eager shared look of camaraderie in his eyes and Phil understands in a moment that denying the question or asking what exactly a Boudin Noir was would only open the way to asking what Phil meant to do with the blood.

“I-yes, Boudin Noir. I’d wanted to cook something new this week, so I thought I’d branch out and give this a try. ” Phil swallows and raises his chin in what he hopes is an air of believable confidence.

The butcher leans back with a broad smile and launches into an elaborately detailed account of his experiences as a boy working the kitchens of premier restaurants in France and Poland alongside chefs like Thomas Keller, watching the dish be made, a dish Phil begins to understand consists mainly of sausage casings stuffed with spices and thickened pig’s blood.

“Christ, not this again with the blood sausage, Tony!” Another butcher calls out from a back room with a laugh. “Give the man his order, not a fucking documentary.”

“It’s rare to find someone who appreciates it enough to want to make it from scratch. Let me have my moment,” Tony calls back with a twirl of the pen in his hands before addressing Phil again. “My granddad made an excellent boudin noir in his day. Tried his hand at morcilla as well, but it was never as good as the one I had in San Juan, made right in the heart of the city by people who know. People can get squeamish about it when they ask what it is, but it’s nothing compared to this lièvre à la royale I had in France one time. Now that would turn a few delicate stomachs.”

Another customer interrupts with an apology to ask a question about an order they had placed and Tony quickly excuses himself from the conversation. “Ah-just a minute I’ll be right back with you.” He leaves to check on the customer’s order and Phil takes the opportunity to consult his phone and determine what exactly a lièvre à la royale was. Just as Tony had mentioned, his own apparently ‘delicate stomach’ does a queasy heave when he pulls up the picture of a whole rabbit cooked in a sauce thickened with its own blood. His old house rabbit Holly comes to mind as he sifts through various more alarming pictures and he looks up from his phone with a shell-shocked expression on his face that makes the woman waiting for her order next to him give him a second glance of concern.

“Sorry about that. We’re a bit short-staffed today.” Tony ambles back to the counter and opens his notepad. “So boudin noir, eh? I’m assuming you want the fresh variant not the dried?”

“Er…right. The liquid form.” Phil says, committed to playing along with the butcher’s pat assumption that he needed the blood for a type of blood sausage. The excuse might not have occurred to him otherwise. Now he only needed to make it through the rest of the conversation without tripping himself up in too many details that might reveal his intentions for the blood had nothing to do with a culinary dish.

“The fresh variety then, got it. They make us jump through hoops with paperwork and inspections, but I say it’s worth it for a better quality product. Are you sure one pint is enough? My granddad always needed a quart or more when he cooked his. Of course if you’re just dabbling with it for the first time better to go with a pint.”

“No, I need…more than that.”

Tony raises an eyebrow. “Yeah? What are we talking about here-a couple of quarts then? Best not to get too much. It goes off quicker than milk.”

“Oh, then…” Phil calculates in his head rapidly. How much was too much and how much was too little? He needed a sufficient amount to satiate Dan’s thirst today with enough left over to last for at least a week so that he wouldn’t have to show up again day after day with the same order to arouse suspicion.

_Or gain a reputation as the guy in the neighborhood who really likes blood sausage. Wouldn’t that be an interesting internet rumor for people to toss around? I wonder how many vampire Phil fictions that would inspire?_

“Er-then make it five quarts,” he says finally.

“Alright. We’ll have it ready for you in a tick. That’ll just be fifty pounds.”

_Fifty…pounds?_

As he fishes for his wallet, he realizes it hadn’t occurred to him how exclusive and expensive Dan’s new diet actually was. It wasn’t as if he could walk into a Tesco’s double-up event and take advantage of a discounted sale on pig’s blood like he would a family sized box of cereal. He wasn’t sure if perhaps the Ginger Pig itself might be too expensive or if this was the norm for all butchers in the area selling a product with a negligible demand and a rapid date of expiry.

_Either way_ , Phil thinks as he pays for the order and waits for it to arrive, _it’s a new expense we’re just going to have to make do with. Maybe now’s a good time to check in with Martyn and see how our merch sales are going._

It only takes a few minutes for Tony to re-emerge carrying two double packed bags in his arms and Phil is almost tempted to ask just where the blood had been stored for it to have been retrieved so quickly, but decides not to in the off chance the answer included a live pig somewhere in the back room.

“Five quarts as requested.” Tony sets the bags down on the counter. “Get it home quickly and put it in the fridge if you’re not going to be cooking it all tonight. Oh – I forgot to ask. You have the sausage casings?”

“Yeah,” Phil says. “Of course. Loads.”

“Great. If you come back again, let me know how it went.”

Phil quickly gives another thank you and leaves before Tony can question him further on his cooking process. He gathers up the bags, unprepared for the dense heft of them after Tony had carried them over as if they weighed next to nothing (with those arms, maybe they don’t, Phil thinks) and he carefully makes his way to the door, the entire time praying to any and all deities of proficient walking skills that he could make it out of the shop and into a taxi before his power of clumsiness activated itself, spilling fifty pounds worth of pig’s blood all over himself and any passerby in the immediate path of destruction. Once outside however the real challenge presents itself in how to hail a taxi with his arms occupied.

_Suddenly, having a third hand doesn’t sound so impractical anymore._

He stands at the curb and cranes his neck, giving the most expressive look of pleading for a taxi he can manage, but one by one, every black cab zips by without slowing down, apparently interpreting his expression as one of philosophical turmoil. He risks an elbow and tries to wave it in the direction of another passing taxi but other than attracting the skeptical glance of a man walking by and feeling ridiculous, the cab pays him no mind and he decides to give up the attempt before he ended up being surreptitiously recorded on Vine with the caption, ‘Amazingchickendance.’

“Phil?”

He blanches and his next breath catches in his throat. It’s all he needs, another viewer with a request for a selfie right when his arms are laden with fresh pig’s blood and a forehead shiny with frustrated exertion to just get home. He could be gracious and acknowledge his name or feign ignorance and be accosted anyway. Faced with two options and the same resolution no matter which he took, he turns to face the person, fully prepared to mask his mood with a smile. Instead of a viewer however he’s startled to notice Susan paused at the corner of the street just before the zebra crossing. She waves a hand in greeting when she recognizes him and approaches.

“Thought it was you. I left my phone on the counter at the restaurant and had to run back to get it. I was just heading back now when I saw you standing here. You alright?”

“Yes, just trying to get a taxi, but-” He shifts the bags in his arms for emphasis.

“Oh, that’s a problem. Hold on. I’ve got it.” She steps up to the curb and snaps her fingers in a bid to catch the attention of a black cab as it drives down the street and the car promptly coasts to a stop just before them. Without needing to be asked, she grabs the handle of the passenger door and opens it, gesturing for him to enter with a flourish of her hand like a chauffeur. “There’s your ride sorted.”

“Thanks!” He quickly ambles over and slips the bags down on the seat, leaving room for himself to slide in after.

“Get home safe.” Susan backs up onto the pavement and waves. “They said it’s going to be a hell of a storm later.”

“Really?” Phil looks out of the cab to observe placid blue skies and an unassuming scudding of white clouds without a hint of rain looming on the horizon.

“That’s the way it always is,” she calls out over her shoulder as she heads off. “The calm before the storm.”

### ❧❧❧❧

His driver this time isn’t one for conversation. Other than the exchanged pleasantries of a greeting and asking how the day was going, the driver offers no other attempt at conversation and the entire rest of the way back to the house proceeds uneventfully except for when he reaches for the bag of sesame seed pastries and realizes he’d left them on the counter in the butcher shop. Once home, it’s another juggle of a circus act at the front door to balance the bags and set them down on the stoop so he can fish the keys from his jacket pocket. Then he faces the tentative ascent up the stairs at a slow pace as he tries to keep the bags and himself from tumbling headlong over the banister. After a series of extended balancing acts and feats of skill he never thought he’d be capable of, he finally steps into the flat and heads towards the kitchen where he sets the bags down on the counter to catch his breath and ease the strained ache in his arms.

Other than the muffled buzz of drills continuing their excavations outside, the flat remains quiet and empty, but this time he doesn’t panic as he had before on first arriving home from the train when he hadn’t been sure what might be waiting on the other end of days full of silence. He knows Dan is safe, if secluded in his room due to circumstances outside of his control, and Phil accepts the detail as a reassuring one.

When he opens the fridge, the gadget in the shape of a milk carton with a walrus’s face reacts to the light turning on and offers its customary automated greeting in Japanese, a cheery spontaneous hello to lift the stifled atmosphere in the room. It’s a better reminder of Dan who had gifted him the little fridge walrus as a birthday present so that when he went to the kitchen for a cold drink or a snack he couldn’t help a smile at the riffling phrases of Japanese that greeted him every time he opened the fridge door. He gently nudges it aside along with their collection of produce and condiment bottles to make room for the containers on the shelves. It takes some time to reorganize everything, but when he’s done, the fridge is neatly divided down the middle, with one side of the shelves containing all the usual varieties of a human diet and the other containing a crowd of stark white Styrofoam containers filled to the brim with fresh blood.

He stares at it for a time, taking in the strange juxtaposition between the physical representation of their marked differences displayed in the fridge and after a moment further of quiet contemplation, the fridge walrus interrupts with a protest for him to please shut the door.

He quickly complies and heads for the lounge where he promptly drops onto the sofa cushions.

_Now I just have to…wait._

With his errand complete, there’s still a fair amount of time left before evening falls, leaving him to occupy himself as best as he could in the meantime.

 _I could send out a tweet_ , he thinks. _It’s not a video, but at least it’ll do until I can figure out when exactly I can upload something again._

He checks for his phone to log onto the app more easily than booting up his laptop, but after a few minutes of rummaging through his jacket pockets and searching for it in the kitchen he comes to the sudden realization that he’d left his phone in the cab.

_Great._

What was he supposed to do now? Put out an APB for a missing iPhone left in one of the many cabs zipping through London at this very moment? By now it could have been snatched up by another passenger or pocketed by the driver. Without a means to locate it or contact the company to see if someone had turned it in, Phil begrudgingly resigns himself to the loss.

Not keen on frustrating his mood further by thinking about it, he grabs the laptop from his room, heads back to the lounge and opens the browser to his twitter account. He logs in to find his mentions full of viewers asking when a new video could be expected or sharing their enthusiasm over the new selfie recently posted with the girls he remembers meeting in Regents Park. Interspersed with the exclamatory jumble of delight there’s the usual array of questionable requests and pointed inquiries about his life that he ignores out of hand. There’s yet a few hundred more comments replying to old tweets from several years ago as if he’d only just tweeted them today, others merely contain the simple address of ‘dad’ or ‘son’ and sometimes both at the same time, others ask for dog ratings while providing an accompanying picture of their family pet and he sifts through a menagerie of Shiba Inus, Huskies and Pomeranians unable to decide on a better rating for any of them except a solid 10/10.

Years ago he’d never imagined having an audience with such numbers, let alone they would fill his twitter feed with replies and mentions by the thousands. There’s an aspect of it both daunting and incredible. Suddenly Phil from Rossendale wasn’t merely just that anymore. He was Phil from Manchester, Phil from London, Phil from YouTube and Phil from Radio 1-a personality with more distinction than just a boy from Northern England with a degree in film and linguistics. Some days he didn’t feel any different from who he knew himself to be, but sometimes, like now, looking down at a forest of replies and tweets with his name as the intended recipient, he’s struck with the gulf of difference between the Phil from years ago in an unedited black and white clip welcoming viewers to his first video blog and the Phil right now, sitting in a flat in London so many years later with an accumulated list of successes he shared with a friend who himself was no longer the same boy with a laptop camera and a tentative greeting as he slid into view on his first upload to YouTube.

_Of course now we’re even more different than before. In every literal way possible._

He still wasn’t sure how to cope with that change, but his small errand outside had helped instill a sense of accomplishment better than staying at home and brooding over their circumstances. Things had changed, but that didn’t mean he was entirely helpless or that he couldn’t try to accommodate that change however best he could and it didn’t mean some things wouldn’t be the same. Their home was still here, Dan was still with him and they were both still alive, small details in contrast to everything else which had happened, but crucial ones nevertheless.

He stares down at the blank space of his tweet for a minute longer, trying to decide how best to satisfy the pleading demand for some sign of his presence, before recounting the small adventure of his walk through Regents Park and his experience with pho in a neat summary punctuated by a threefold emoji pictorial of flowers, trees and a soup bowl. He sends it out into the world and barely three seconds later a cascade of likes and replies follow. Usually he’d sift through the most relevant messages to reply back to, but this time he closes the browser and shuts his laptop, too precoccupied with the thought of facing the long wait towards sunset to think of anything else worthwhile to say.

_Now I can just sit here and stare at the ceiling of the lounge until nightfall or I can try to distract myself doing something else. Maybe the time will pass quicker that way._

He can’t remember the last time either of them had topped up the plants with water and he sets about doing so, checking water levels of each plant in turn, trimming the brown edges off leaves and nearly sticking the pad of his hand with a few dozen glochids from the tiny cactus on the window. When he reaches the large potted fern out in the hall he’s somewhat dismayed to find it leaning at a precarious angle as if neglect has made it too weary and top heavy to support itself any longer. The central stalk is not as sturdy as it once was and as Phil checks the soil he finds a small white mushroom has suddenly taken up residence in the pot. He can’t be sure if it’s a case of over watering, under watering, poor drainage or if the mushroom is simply a rogue product of happenstance, but he decides to leave it alone for the moment until he can research it later.

He’s just about finished tending to their botanical menagerie when he runs into the small plant Dan had bought during his fateful trip to the florist. It sits on the radiator, small and unassuming and it’s strange to think how as an alleged harbinger of good luck, it had become the very embodiment of irony instead. He’s surprised Dan had bought the plant at all when he was of the stringent opinion that the only manner of luck which existed was the opportunities people made for themselves, not luck as a sentient force which could be invoked at will, certainly not by way of a potted plant.

Still, there was a certain element of luck involved with their recent encounters which he couldn’t deny, first, with Dan surviving his confrontation with the ancient vampire in the flower shop, then later with Phil’s narrow escape from the alley and just hours before with Dan in the darkness of his room, fangs clamped to his arm with a bite that had nearly drove them both over the edge. Coincidences and near misses, he knows Dan might say, but it’s still funny in hindsight how everything had begun with the simple purchase of one unassuming plant. Funnier still how his entire career, his friendship with Dan, had begun with the prize of a black and white camera in a cereal box, two objects which on their own held no greater purpose, but in context had become vital cornerstones for the two most important changes in his life.

He turns the plant around slowly in his hands, studies the intersecting branches of its trunk coiled in an inseparable knot like a repeating lemniscate and thinks, _It really is the small things isn’t it?_

He sets the plant back down on the radiator and dribbles a few drops of water into its soil. The rest of the day plods on in a blur of mindless tasks. Bills are sorted through, clothing is folded, a cold drink is made and the television turned on to provide background noise. Through it all his mind continues to wander to the closed door of Dan’s bedroom and the displayed clock on his phone until finally, the daylight in the lounge dims as the sun takes its leave. It’s a slow going descent, perhaps because he’s anxiously waiting for it to disappear the way he used to stare at the clock in school, trying to move the hour hand by force of will when stuck in a class that couldn’t be over fast enough.  
He begins to pull the shades down over the windows in the lounge when he looks up and something catches his eye. 

A scrap of grey cloud is oozing its way across the sky, extending out over the city in a dusky mantle with the obvious threat of a storm that wasn’t there before, just as Susan had said. It looks too small and harmless however to be of any real concern and its slow growth heralds something more suited to a small downpour than a proper thunderstorm, especially not after last night’s deluge. The day had been too pleasant anyway for a storm to set in so quickly without warning, even by London’s own pluviose standards.

_Anyway, it’s not like we’ll be going anywhere tonight. Not with whoever or whatever might be watching us out there._

He knows Dan can’t stay locked in the flat forever, even with his self-professed enthusiasm for enjoying nothing else than just that while embarking on hour long quests in Guild Wars or reviewing a new album release shut up in his room to better immerse himself in the music. Eventually however, circumstance and restlessness would lead him to venture back outside, but for now, with the fridge stocked and the house secure, Phil thinks they could risk a week or so without any evening outings, at least until the Night Court made their move.

Dusk now. The sun is little more than a streak of purpled glow in the sky and Phil thinks maybe now might be the best time to prepare a container from the fridge before Dan emerged with a harried surge of fresh hunger that might lead him to forego the tedium of heating the blood on the stove and seize on Phil as a more accessible entrée instead.

 _It’s like making breakfast_ , he thinks to himself over and over as he selects a container from the fridge. _Like all the times I’d prepare coffee for the both of us before he woke up. Just like that. That’s all it is really. Just think of it that way._

His conscious mind might be trying its best at reassurance but every other instinct in his body curls away from the soured smell that rises when he pries off the lid.

_Just pour it into the bowl and don’t think about what it is, don’t think about how bad it smells or how gloopy it looks or how I just spilled a bit over the bowl and onto my finger oh._

Without thinking, he shakes his hand frantically as if he were trying to dislodge a spider crawling over his skin and the trail of blood on his finger smatters in a dotted spray on the floor.

_Brilliant._

He wipes his hand on a paper towel and quickly dabs the residual mess on the tiles before it can set into a stain that might require more scrubbing than his endurance will allow. It’s simpler to place the bowl on top of the pot simmering on the stove in the familiar set up of a bain-marie they’d used many times before when melting chocolate for another baking recipe. The dour smell from the bowl however is nothing quite so aromatic as heated chocolate and more reminiscent of every bad stench he’d rather be upwind of instead of hovering over the pot with his face directly in front of it. It takes a monumental effort of restraint for him to stay in the kitchen and watch the bowl simmer and not chuck the grisly brew down the sink.

_There’s an idea for a new cooking video. Bowl of blood with Dan and Phil. Ingredients you will need: one container of blood fresh from the butcher’s, one clothespin for your nose and five minutes to question your sanity._

When the mixture is done he switches off the flame and carefully removes the bowl from the pot with a pair of oven mitts and sets it on a dinner plate where it looks less conspicuous. At a glance it could just be a normal serving of soup in a bowl, but the smell and the few spilled streaks of red on the stove remind him it isn’t soup at all. 

He glances at the kitchen window, notes the crepuscular afterglow of a sky now devoid of any hint of sunlight and decides now is the best time to see if Dan might be awake. He makes his way down the hall with a measured tread so as not to upset the plate in his hands and manages to reach the door without incident. Balancing the plate in one hand, he lifts the other to knock.

Silence.

He knocks again, presses his ear to the door and listens.

This time he can make out a groggy mumble of a protest and the whispered rasp of the bed covers moving around on the bed.

“Dan, it’s me. Can I come in?”

Another mumble answers him in a run-on jumble of words he can barely make out before it abruptly cuts short. A sustained and profound silence follows in which Phil has the distinct impression that Dan is fixating not only on the sound of his voice but on the smell of the blood in the bowl held in his hand.

“Dan?”

Silence again. Then, after an uneasy pause, “…It’s alright. Come in.”

Darkness and long shadows follow as he opens the door slowly and turns to look at the bunched hill of his duvet on Dan’s bed as he sets the plate down on the bed side table and waits. The duvet twitches, settles back into place and then falls away as Dan emerges, eyes fixed on the bowl. They’re not yet black but the irises are dark enough to make no difference, his entire body yearning and poised towards the smell rising with the steam into the room. He looks just as bedraggled and feral as he had before and Phil wonders if he should leave Dan to it, but just as he slowly backs towards the door Dan’s stare shifts to focus on him instead with a rapt unblinking intensity, freezing him in place.  
It’s a sidling, considering look as if he’s listening to things Phil can’t hear, senses attuned to the frequency of his heartbeat and the smell of his emotions. Then, with a startled expression as if he’d only just become aware of staring overly long at Phil, he turns his gaze away and leans against the headboard.

“Is this the new equivalent of breakfast in bed then?” Dan’s voice is still rasped and harsh, but he gives a thin watered down smile to accompany the wry tone and Phil gradually relaxes.

“Maybe, but don’t get used to it. I thought I was going to pass out the entire time it was heating up.”

“I think I’m more impressed you went out to buy this at all.” Dan shifts to a more comfortable position with a subtle but distinct cant of his upper body trained towards the bowl. “Where did you go?”

“Moxon Street. The Ginger Pig.”

“The what?” Dan looks mildly amused by the name.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought the first time I saw it. It wasn’t so bad ordering from there though. Before I was convinced they’d call the police on me straight away.”

“Well, you have places that sell goat’s head and chicken feet for soup, so that’s probably not the strangest request they’ve ever had. Teague did mention to just say I was making blood sausage if anyone at the shop decided to ask.”

“That’s what the man who sold it to me thought too. I didn’t exactly want to convince him otherwise. He was a big advocate of blood sausage. Bit weird actually the way he was so emphatic about it. Not so much about this lièvre royale dish though.”

“Do I want to know what that it is?”

Phil remembers his house rabbit again and shudders. “No...”

“You alright? You know…” Dan clears his throat and gestures to indicate the plasters on Phil’s arm.

“Fine actually. It doesn’t hurt anymore.” Phil holds up his arm and presses the site of the wound for emphasis. “At first I was afraid it might get infected, like a bite from a Gila Monster?”

Dan gives him a pointed stare. “Excuse me.”

“But it’s not obviously,” Phil quickly goes on. “I feel fine now.”

“Good. That’s…good.” Dan’s jaw works silently and Phil can almost see the internal struggle of him trying to hold a civil conversation and not just grab the bowl at his side and submerge his face in it as Phil had been tempted to earlier with the pho.

“It’s fine you know, we can talk later,” he says. “I know you need to get on with it. I’ll be in the lounge when you’ve finished up.”

Dan snorts laughter. “Could you could make it sound any more as if I’m about to…you know.”

It takes a minute for Phil to understand, but then it dawns on him.

“Oh. Oh god no. You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. That’s probably best actually. I don’t know what will happen if you’re here when I finish drinking. It gets a bit intense the first few seconds after and if you’re in the room…” He trails off, lets the silence and the memory of the bite on Phil’s arm speak for itself.

“Right. I understand.” Phil heads towards the door as Dan reaches for the bowl and takes it between his hands with mincing delicacy, inhaling the scent of it with evident pleasure. He holds it up towards Phil as if extending a toast and says, “cheers,” before his eyes drown completely to black. Phil takes his cue and leaves, closing the door behind him before heading down the hall into the lounge to wait.

 _I feel like that’s the only thing I’ve been doing since early this morning. Just waiting_ , he thinks. _Not just for Dan, but for whatever might happen next._

It’s well past the point of agonizing over anymore however and he settles onto the sofa with the remote control in hand to idly skim through channels until Dan finished his meal. It’s then he hears the soft patter of rain against the windows. It’s gentle however, the kind of misty drizzle that one could walk through without an umbrella and he wonders, given the pleasant day, if it really would turn into the storm Susan had warned him about. A sudden flutter of movement by his head distracts him from the weather and he jerks back, the remote falling from his hand, as the object brushes his face before moving away. It’s alive, whatever it is and it’s only when the thing darts towards the chandelier overhead that he realizes it’s a butterfly.

“Where did you come from?” He wonders aloud and ducks as the butterfly flits back down over his head and comes to a rest on the armrest of the sofa. The upstairs window in the office was the most liable suspect for point of entry. They usually left it open to allow some air to recirculate as heat most often traveled its way up the stairs and made the office space more stifling than the rest of the house. In the summer months Dan fought the usual battle between asphyxiating with nothing but a fan for relief or opening the window and risking the arrival of every species of insect native to London. Butterflies however were the least intimidating houseguest compared to spiders or grasshoppers and one Phil thinks he can manage to corral without too much trouble.  
Or so he believes until he’s led on a small chase around the room, hands outstretched to catch the butterfly as it flits from the sofa to the coffee table, then back around the chandelier in a dizzy arc before it rests at last on the doorknob and Phil is able to cup it in his hands before it can take off again.

Apparently exhausted from its unsuccessful bid to find the way outside it sits in the palms of his hands, flexing its wings slowly in the butterfly equivalent of catching its breath. He studies it for a moment, peeking through his fingers at the small red and brown wings and the fuzz covered lozenge of its body.

_It looks so weird, but…kind of cute._

He’s mesmerized by it, appreciating the striated pattern of color on its wings and the gentle sway of them moving back and forth, but then it crawls forward with a tickling sensation of unease against his skin and he quickly heads up to the office to release it back out the window it had come through before he inadvertently squashed it with the urge to brush it away.

He extends his hands out into the wet of the rain and the butterfly perches at his fingertips, sensing the air with another fragile shudder of its wings. It lingers, quiet and still, as if reluctant to leave the relative security of his hand for the vast unknowns of the city beyond their house, then it flutters off into the cool drizzle of the evening and he loses sight of it as it disappears past the street below.

“Phil?” Dan calls from the foot of the stairs, sounding much more like himself and Phil quickly shuts the window to meet him downstairs.

“I’m here.” He leaves the office and pauses at the landing for a better look at Dan. He’s still just as bedraggled as he had been the night before, with hair tossed beyond messy and rumpled clothing that looks as if it hasn’t seen an iron in ages, but he looks more present and aware, with an obvious pale flush of color under his skin, ruddy with the blood he’d just taken. There’s a noticeable mien of weariness to his posture and in the small shadows under his eyes, but Phil could hardly fault him that with everything he’d been through in the past few days.

“Alright?” 

“Five by five.” Dan smiles. “Thanks again by the way. You know…for doing what you did-going to buy that for me.”

“You needed it and I needed a good excuse to go outside and distract myself.” Phil descends the rest of the way down the stairs and they head into the lounge where the sound of rain against the glass is a quiet accompaniment to the television on low in the background.

Dan promptly flops onto the sofa and situates himself in his usual position of the sofa crease. “Any new encounters of the third kind: strangers in London edition?”

“Well, there was the cabbie Manchester United enthusiast.” Phil takes his place at the other end of the sofa and sits cross-legged on the seat cushions. “The entire ride was like a live recording of Match of the Day.” 

“All cabbies are Manchester United enthusiasts. It’d be stranger if you found one that wasn’t.”

“He said I should be the next Andy Tate.”

Dan snorts. “There you go, a viable job opportunity if YouTube doesn’t work out. It’d be me with my candle shop and you commentating on the FA cup finals. We’re set for life.”

“Oh…hold on. I almost forgot. It’s not strange, but I think you’d like this.” Phil remembers the video on his phone of the boy playing the violin. “He was across the street from the restaurant I was eating at.”

He plays the video and Dan leans over to see. The expression on his face looks quietly delighted and he doesn’t say a word until the small clip reaches the end. “I think my personal envy monster’s just had a revival with that performance. He’s good isn’t he? This was by Moxon Street?”

“Yeah. I was sat outside this pho restaurant and he was playing the entire time. It was nice.”

“Pho? That’s different. For you, I mean.”

Phil shrugs. “I don’t know-I thought I’d try something different for a change, just take advantage of whatever opportunities present themselves. Even if it’s just food I’ve never tried before.”

“That’s brave of you.”

Phil eyes him, carefully searching for a hint of sarcasm, but finds nothing there except for a thoughtful and vaguely proud look on his face as he stares back.  
“What?”

“What what?” Dan blinks at him, genuinely confused.

“You know-why are you looking at me like that?”

Dan takes a moment to answer and picks up a cushion to idly toy with the edges as he thinks. “You know how a person can say something and you might not actually believe them until they demonstrate it with their actions? Like the old cliché, talk is cheap? It keeps dawning on me how you’re still here, how you do want to try and take risks, even if it’s something as small as trying some food in a restaurant you’ve never been to before or something as critical as staying here when you could have taken the opportunity to leave.”

“I told you I wouldn’t.”

“I know you did, but after what I did to you-and almost did to you-a part of me was sure you’d just bow out, sign off on the last act and go. But you didn’t, even if that was the easier choice. I just think that’s very brave…”

“Or stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.” Dan’s tone is adamant now. “You’re strange and clumsy and you leave socks in the most random places through the house, but you’re not stupid.”

Once again Phil is faced with the challenge to provide an answer that isn’t too trite or dismissive, but what was left to say that hadn’t already been said? As Dan had pointed out, actions spoke louder than words and he wasn’t sure a dissertative speech on the entire range of his feelings was appropriate or even necessary. He didn’t need to belabor a point they both already understood. Saying ‘I love you,’ didn’t always make it so and not saying the words didn’t mean they couldn’t be felt just as strongly through actions instead.  
The pause between them seems to communicate his thoughts effortlessly so that the silence is comfortable, not tense or expectant. Or maybe it was that Dan could sense his resolve now, like an aroma without a true comparison, like the word for how it smells after it rains, like petrichor, like electric heat.

The moment lingers for a minute more, stretching out into the quiet of the rain picking up momentum against the glass and the dull hum of commercials playing across the television screen as they share a pointed look that says all of anything that could possibly be said. Then Dan stretches and yawns, his mouth opening wide in a near jaw cracking gape that shows his fangs.

“I think I’m going to take a shower,” he says. “I feel like a crusty sponge.”

“Going to tame the hobbit hair, then?” Phil leans over and makes to poke an errant curl hanging over Dan’s ear, but he moves out of reach.

“I wouldn’t mind so much if it did look like hobbit’s hair, but right now I just look like a fucking Tangela.”

“Well, try not to use too much shower gel like you usually do. We don’t have much left and I forgot to buy more when I went out.”

“’Like I usually do?’” Dan repeats the words with a note of incredulity, struggling not to return Phil’s amused smirk and failing. “I think I use the right amount of shower gel proportionate to someone my size.”

“You use half a bottle in one go.”

“I like smelling nice

“I like not having to pick up more shower gel every other day.”

“Buy your own?”

“I already do that and you end up using mine too.”

“Think of it as payback for every time my cereal mysteriously goes missing.”

Phil admits defeat with a laugh and waves him on his way. “Fine then. Go douse yourself in shower gel.”

“I will, thank you,” Dan says breezily and stands up from the sofa with the intent to go and do just that. “I’ll probably be in there for a while, just in case you wonder if I’ve dissolved down the drain.”

“Alright. What do you want to do after?”

Dan pauses at the door. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Anything. I don’t exactly like the idea of us just sitting here worrying. I thought we could just do something to take our minds off of everything else and relax, since we’re still able to do that.”

“It’s the elephant in the room, Phil. It’s kind of impossible not to think about it when I’m the proverbial elephant.”

“I know, but if we’re going to go along with what you said, if there’s nothing we can possibly do about it, then let’s make the best of the night until we can figure out if there’s anything we can do or until we understand what the Night Court will want from us.”

Dan looks off into the middle distance, as if mulling over the wisdom of distracting themselves with idle pursuits when they faced the prospect of an entire court of ancient creatures looking for them, but then he gives way to the idea with a nod. “Yeah, that sounds better actually. Video games you think? Say, Mario Kart?”

“That’s not exactly relaxing.”

“Because you lose when we play against each other and you can’t use your ‘all or nothing’ strategy?”

Phil draws his shoulders up and takes on an offended air. “That’s not true. I’d win even without that.”

Dan stares at him, eyebrows raised.

“Alright, sometimes. But I’d still win.”

“Fine, then. Mario Kart it is. And no ‘all or nothing.’” Dan backs out into the hallway, pointing his finger at Phil with mock authority as he goes until Phil laughs and he disappears behind the door and down the stairs towards the bathroom.

Phil occupies himself with the TV in the meantime and raises the volume as a forecaster takes to the screen with the rundown of the weather for the next few hours in London, waving his hands over the projected image of a Jetstream moving across the map directly over the city:  
“Met office amber warnings are in place for parts of central and southern England including all London boroughs effective until four am tomorrow. Of course this means we can expect possible power disruptions and structural damage in that time so we would advise all people to remain indoors and off all roads and streets, barring any pertinent emergencies. Wind gusts of up to 70 and 80 mph are expected at certain intervals along with very heavy downpours. It’s looking to be a severe localized event in our area and of course we will have all the latest updates from the Met office should the warnings change in the next few hours. As of now, we are warning all people traveling in London to please stay alert and be prepared.”

A crushing boom of thunder punctuates the forecaster’s speech, reverberating through the flat like a small earthquake and as the aftershock of echoes dies away the rain begins to fall in earnest against the windows.

She was right. It really was the calm before the storm, Phil thinks.

WHUMP

Another crashing thud resounds through the flat which has nothing to do with thunder and Phil jumps in his seat, on high alert. It didn’t sound as if it had come from their neighbor or from a car door slamming outside, but somewhere closer against the side of the house. His fingers skip across the remote and he hits the mute button for the television. The forecaster is cut short in the middle of his description of possible tidal surges and the rain pings and skitters against the glass, filling the silence. Another grumble of thunder resounds before seguing back to the sound of the rain and the sloshed hiss of cars passing in the street. He’s begun to settle for the assumption that the sound had come from their next door neighbor after all or from a large item being dropped in the street when it happens again.

WHUMP

_That’s coming from the kitchen. Maybe a bird got trapped on the fire escape?_

WHUMP WHUMP

He bolts up from the sofa, the remote control tumbling from his lap to the floor. Whatever it is, it’s larger than a bird and more deliberate, as if it weren’t trapped on the fire escape, but climbing it with the express purpose of coming through the window. To encourage his imagination further, the sound from the kitchen suddenly changes to a skritching tapping of something or someone drawing their hands down the glass in search of the jamb.

_Oh god…What do I do? What do I do?_

Every episode of every true crime documentary series he’d ever watched comes to mind like a bad migraine detailing terrifying ordeals of home invasions involving flick knives and firearms.

_It could still just be a bird or some kind of animal stuck on the fire escape. I can’t call the police when I don’t know what it is. But what if it is someone, what if they’re trying to break in and they see me and the window is already open and they’re already halfway through-_

He knows if he thinks about it any longer he’ll lose any motivation to check the sound at all and he forces himself to move in a halting tread towards the door as the sounds from the kitchen continue. He eases out into the hallway, one hand on the wall to steady himself against inadvertently tripping over the carpet and alerting a potential intruder to his presence. One more step and he’ll be at the kitchen door, but he lingers behind the wall listening, every nerve electrified to frantic, his mind racing with possible scenarios and modes of escape. He’s just about bottled his courage to burst into the room without a plan except the element of surprise to startle whoever might be on the other side of the window when a hand clenches down on his shoulder.

“AH-!!!” In a burst of panic he whirls without thinking and brings his arm around with a braced fist directly into the stomach of the person behind him.

“Jesus Christ what the hell-?!”

Dan backs up against the wall, seemingly more out of surprise than injury with a towel wrapped around his waist and beads of water dotting his skin. Phil recoils backwards at the same time with his hand clutched to his chest feeling as if he’d just smacked an iron statue.

“What is _wrong_ with you- what’s going on?”

“Shh!!” Phil leans against the wall, head craned towards the kitchen and Dan immediately quiets, listening along with a frown.

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. I heard a noise like something on the fire escape.” A thought occurs to Phil and he pauses to stare at Dan. “Why are you back up here again?”

“I’d just got in the shower when it smelled like what I told you earlier-corrosive plastic- only this time it was overwhelming. I figured it had to be you or something going on so I came up to see what happened only for you to sucker punch me in the stomach.”

“Well, I’m sorry I didn’t really expect you to come up behind me like a ghost,” Phil hisses back in a whisper.

The scratching turns into a prolonged tapping racket and they turn their attention back to the kitchen.

“I’ll go in first,” Dan says.

“But what if it really is someone? Or…” Phil leaves the last part unsaid, aware they both have already considered the possibility of a renewed visit from the vampire in the alleyway.

“I mean, if they’re trying for stealth they’re failing miserably. I can’t imagine some eldritch vampire stalking us with the finesse of a bull in a china shop, but if it’s a person, it’d still be better if I go in first to deal with them. When you’re already undead it’s not like there’s anything they could do to make me more so. And if it is…you know…another of them, it’d still be better if I meet them first.”

“You know it could just be the duck,” Phil says in a rush before he’s aware of the words leaving his mouth.

Dan’s head turns slowly to level a thousand yard stare at him. “That’s…a very specific thing to say, Phil. Not even just ‘a’ duck, but ‘the’ duck.”

“It’s-a long story. Well, not really. I’ll tell you later.”

WHUMP

Another bang from the fire escape distracts them from any further duck anecdotes. They share a single glance and a nod to signal their intent, then Dan charges into the kitchen with Phil close behind, shadowing his shoulder as they look towards the window and the rattling tapping of the glass.

The blinds are drawn but between the vertical slats Phil sees the bulking shadow of a person dressed in a dark hoodie and the flash of their hands pawing at the glass. On instinct he grabs the closest thing to him on the counter as a means of defense and Dan looks back at him in consternation, gesturing incredulously at the spatula clutched in his hands.

 _Really??_ He mouths the word and Phil makes a prodding gesture with the spatula to urge him on towards the window.

Dan pauses and then in a burst of speed so fast Phil can barely follow it, he grabs the string to pull the blinds and with his newfound strength pulls it so hard the blinds rip clear off the window with a slithering rattle of a crash as they fall to the floor. The person outside freezes and their head tilts up to stare at them with a wide-eyed look of surprise.

“Teague?”

Phil looks between Dan and the boy at the window. The shadows of the hoodie drawn up over his head and the dense thicket of rain pouring around him obscure his features but now Phil can see the distinct pallor of the boy’s hands and the smattering of freckles on his nose that Dan had described when he’d recounted meeting Teague for the first time.

Dan approaches cautiously and Teague mimes through the glass at him to lift up the window.

“Should we really do that,” Phil asks, spatula raised in front of him like a sword.

“He helped me. He didn’t have to that night, but he did and he didn’t strike me as someone who’d have the highest word of praise or support for the Night Court. I think we can trust him.” Dan grabs the window and lifts it up, letting the hushed roar of the falling rain fill the room. Teague doesn’t so much enter the room as fall into it, sliding over the sill and through the window in a sodden heap onto the floor.

“Ah, shit, it’s pouring out there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it get so bad so quickly and I was around when the Thames flooded in ’28.”

“Teague…” Dan stares down at him, watching the small puddle of water dripping from his clothing spread across the tiles. “What are you doing here? How did you even find this house?”

“What-are you joking?” Teague pulls back his hood and laughs, not bothering to pick himself up from his cross-legged position on the floor. “It’s easier than it should be, mate.”

“That’s very reassuring.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. It’s difficult being a complete spectre where the public’s involved. Everyone wants to know more about you until they become more of an expert about you than yourself. Call it innate curiosity combined with irrepressible nosiness.” Teague shrugs as Dan leans over him to shut the window against the rain darting into the kitchen. “Anyway, four hundred years is just enough time to be a decent info broker in this city. I find out loads of things. People can’t blink without someone else noticing and talking about it. Gossip is just about the only other valuable asset in the world other than money and worth ten times as much. For better or for worse and in your case, it’s better.”

“What do you mean?”

Teague opens his mouth to answer, but then he catches sight of Phil peering out from behind Dan.

“And you’re Phil, yeah? I had an idea where you both lived but not the exact flat until I saw you at the upstairs window earlier. Told Dan I liked your videos, especially the one with the tea people. Classic one, that.”

“Oh-er-thank you.” Phil edges out from behind Dan to accept the hand Teague offers in a friendly handshake and fumbles momentarily when he extends the spatula out instead. The coolness of Dan’s skin is nothing compared to the marmoreal frigidity of the hand in his palm and as Teague’s fingers grasp his with gentle pressure there’s a considerable amount of power there in the bones beneath the skin that holds a threat greater than even Dan’s newfound strength. Teague’s grip however bears down with nothing more than a gentle squeeze before pulling away.

“Looks like you nicked your arm just there.” Teague points to the plasters stuck over the bite wound and gives Dan a knowing expression.

“Look, it was an accident. I didn’t-” Dan backpedals defensively, but Teague waves him off.

“Nah, I don’t mean anything by it. I already told you it was just a matter of time before it happened. I’m more impressed it didn’t go any further than that. New blood with their first taste of fresh human blood? That combination don’t always end well for the human in question. You really are something aren’t you?”

“Well, if it weren’t for a glass of water in my face maybe you wouldn’t be so impressed right now.”

Teague scoffs. “You think a splash of water would be enough to put off any new blood that’s just had a proper fix of warm blood in their mouth? The only thing that’s stopping anyone from committing any atrocity is their sense of humanity and restraint. Don’t matter how much your biology’s changed. Some new bloods like to take the excuse and go on a rampage, because that kind of power is so raw and unrestricted by any kind of human law they feel they can make the world bend to their whims and trample anyone in their way, even old friends. I see the appeal, you know, to be weak and unsure of yourself then to suddenly be imbued with strength beyond reason-hard not to take advantage. But you’re not like that. You didn’t shred him into ribbons even though your hunger was at its peak, right when you had your fangs in him. That’s not an accident. That’s incredible.”

“How did you know this was from a bite,” Phil asks. “How could you possibly see that?”

“I don’t know the scientific facts about what we are or why we sense things the way we do. Maybe there’s some kind of enzyme what gets secreted when we bite someone-I dunno-but there’s a kind of static charge of a scent you get when you’re close to someone who’s been bitten like you. We call it a mark.”

“A mark…” Phil thinks over where he’s heard the word in the same context before, but Dan realizes it first.

“Back in the alley-when that vampire attacked us and I stopped him-he said something about a mark, that Phil didn’t have one.”

Teague nods. “Yeah, that’s what I mean. It happens when you bite a human, but you don’t kill them. It’s a mark. Think of it essentially like you’ve given them your signature so no other vampires can encroach on what’s ‘yours,’ so to speak. Whether you’re keepin’ them for leftovers or because you just want to protect them from someone else cruising for a kill. Without it, then it’s first come, first served, which is why Ashton became so royally pissed at you.”

“Ashton?” Phil repeats the name at the same time as Dan.

“Yeah, the toff who you met last night and also the reason I’m here. Everyone’s talking about it. The new blood who defied a steward of the Night Court. You certainly have their attention now.”

“The Night Court’s attention, I’m assuming,” Dan says.

Teague nods. “After Ashton showed up with his sensationalized account of a new blood strong arming him out of a kill, you’re all they’re talking about now. That’s why I came to warn you both. As soon as you step foot out of this house, they’ll take you.”

“Take me.” Dan’s face scrunches into a frown. “That sounds….weird.”

“It means they’ll want to try you before the court itself, interrogate you, see what you’re about and if they see fit to, issue a punishment to equal the crime. And knowing them, they probably will because they find it fun. I told you, they like the politics of intrigue and backstabbing each other whenever possible to make things more interesting, with you turning up and doing what you did you’ve effectively piqued their interest to the exclusion of everything else. They love their games and now they have something new to play with.”

“Can’t they just-I dunno-” Dan gestures exasperatedly, “climb the fire escape like you did and just come through a window? What’s stopping them from coming in here right now and ‘taking’ me like you said

“Because while they play nasty they’re still a bunch of stuffed vultures that preside on tradition and proprieties that went out of style with the guillotine, but thankfully for you it’s a good thing. They won’t approach someone in their own home, partly because it risks visibility which they don’t like, at least not when they can’t assume anonymity for the least exposure to themselves and also because they consider it too gauche. Once you step foot outside however, all bets are off. I don’t know if it’s based on the old superstition that we can’t enter houses unless we’re invited. No idea who started that one, but it’s a convenient loophole in your case.”

“Wait-is that why you came through the fire escape,” Phil asks. “You can’t enter through the front door or something?”

Teague laughs. “I can enter just fine. I don’t want to risk the chance of being seen by one of their lot, especially not if word gets back to Yilmaz that I was here to warn you two. She likes to see things unfold by natural consequence and me being here disrupts that flow. She might not be part of the Night Court, but she’s a force all her own, unpredictable and more dangerous for it.”

Dan looks over at the window and the darkness of the night and the falling rain behind the glass obscuring the street from view. “So you mean they could be out there right now. Watching the house.”

“Like I said, you got their attention the way no one ever has. They won’t waste any time looking for you. If it didn’t take me long to find you, then it’ll take them even less.”

Silence falls across the room, broken only by the intermittent drip of water falling from Teague’s drenched clothing and the persistent drum of rain against the house. Phil becomes hyper aware of the window and the clear line of visibility the absence of the blinds offer and he rushes over to pick them up from the floor in an effort to stick them back over the window to block the room from view. Teague shimmies out of his way across the floor, watching him in pensive silence the entire time with a prolonged stare that tickles uncomfortably along the back of Phil’s neck. After fumbling with the blinds for the third time and failing to wedge them into place on the track, Dan approaches to take them from his hand and give it a try himself. Teague continues to stare, observing every move until Phil gathers his nerve and turns to him.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Just you. Never seen a human take everything as well as you have. Bite on your arm, threat of vampires at your doorstep, your friend being one as well now and you’re just going along with it.” Teague folds his arms and leans against the cabinet at his back. “Interesting, ‘s all.”

“That’s Phil for you.” Dan manages to jam the blinds back into place, albeit bent at an angle and steps back. “He has a fear of deep water, horses and spiders with spindly legs, but vampires apparently are copacetic.”

“You’re scared of horses?” Teague looks amused.

“It’s their legs, alright? You never know when they’re going to bolt or kick you with them. I had a friend who got kicked between the legs by a Shire horse and basically had an on the spot vasectomy.”

“Yeah, well, that’ll do it.” Teague winces in unison with Dan.

“So I don’t understand this-” Dan shakes his head. “We’re just supposed to stay inside the house every night for the foreseeable future? It’s not like that would be a problem. For me I mean. But I’m also not looking forward to the idea of contracting cabin fever for an eternity.”

“I told you. It’s like a game. They can’t wait around forever to see if they can get to you. They’ll give it some time, then they’ll lose interest and you’ll be alright. Ashton’s just a steward anyway and not an important one.”

“How much time will it take until they go away?” Phil glances at the blinds, already imagining a few members of the court stood outside in the rain, hollow eyed faces lined in a row, waiting.

Teague looks away uncomfortably. “I dunno really. Sometimes a few weeks. Sometimes months. Other times…a year. Or more.”

“You’re joking.” Dan expresses Phil’s thoughts before he can speak.

“Well, that’s why I came to warn you didn’t I? I shouldn’t even be here if I’m honest, but when I met you that time I thought you were alright and when I heard how you stood up to Ashton I couldn’t let you blunder into their hands without giving you a heads up about it. Whenever I get new information I’ll pass it along to you, let you know how the climate is and when it might be safe to venture out again, but if you both coordinate-if he gets you the blood you need during the day-” Teague nods over at Phil. “and you both stay here at night, there’s no reason why it can’t work out.”

“And there’s nothing we can do, no petition or letter I could write explaining, ‘hi, yes, new blood here, sorry for rough housing with your steward or whatever, but I don’t appreciate when vampires try to eat my friends. Please understand. Sincerely, Dan.’”

Teague rocks with laughter at the idea. “If there’s one thing the Night Court never are, it’s pragmatic. They’re traditionalists, but they have their own idea of what that word means and it has nothing to do with impassioned pleas for mercy. They want a show and you volunteered a performance without even knowing you did. So now, they’ll linger and they’ll watch to see if they can either provoke you or take you to play with you more until they get tired of the hunt. Being one of Yilmaz’s though- that’s apt to pique their interest even more.”

“Why,” Phil asks.

“Because when Yilmaz turns a person she does it so infrequently it’s like hearing about fucking Halley’s Comet. It always raises eyebrows. The Night Court’s especially. They want to know who the person is and why they’re so special for Yilmaz of all people to take interest. She’s not a picky eater, but when it comes to making another vampire she always has an agenda. I don’t know if they’re afraid she’s trying to stir the pot for dissent, but now they know he’s Yilmaz’s own, they’re not liable to lose interest quickly.”

“Wonderful.” Dan tousles his hair in mild aggravation. “So it’s a waiting game where they might never go away at all. It’s like trying to find a more discreet way out of a hotel at Vidcon.”

“Except the viewers just want a selfie, not to punish you before a court of ancient vampires,” Phil points out.

“The way internet gossip rolls you don’t need an ancient court of vampires to hand down a punishing judgment, believe me.” Dan quirks an eyebrow. “Even if we could engineer a scenario for a prolonged absence from YouTube or the radio, we can’t keep it up forever. We have events we might be invited to attend, places to travel to, friends, family-even if I love the excuse to stay inside, it’s not feasible.”

“I know some guys who could help coordinate travel for you both on the sly,” Teague says, “but when it comes to the Night Court they have ways of finding out about these things better than even I can. If I can help in some way I’ll still try. I know it’s not ideal, but for right now, you don’t have a choice.”

Dan tousles his hair again and slumps in resignation against the counter. Teague was their best link to understanding any options they had out of an impossible scenario and now, he’d only confirmed what they both had already thought from the start. There was nothing at all they could do, but sit and wait and wonder.

“Oi, listen, is it alright if I hang out here for a bit?” Teague looks between them both sheepishly. “Took me some time to get over here and that climb up the fire escape wasn’t easy going in the rain. Sorry about that by the way. It’s not like I planned on breakin’ in, but I didn’t want to be seen by your neighbors or one of them.”

“Yeah, of course. That’s fine,” Phil says immediately. “Hang on. I’ll get you a towel.”

“Speaking of…” Dan looks down at the towel wrapped around his waist. “I have a shower to get back to and as we’re not under attack by elder vampires or rogue ducks at the moment I’m getting back to it.”

“Ducks?” Teague asks in bemusement.

“It’s a long story. Just-forget it.” Phil quickly exits the kitchen to grab a towel and Dan follows after him with a small laugh.

“What did you think of all that,” Dan asks when they reach the bathroom. 

“Of Teague? I think he’s nice, like you said.” Phil rummages through a drawer for a clean towel and lifts one out. “Scared me to death at first though.”

“No, I mean, all the rest of it-of the Night Court and us staying here and there being nothing we can do.”

“I don’t like it, but we don’t have any other choice like he said except to wait it out and hope they leave us alone. I don’t know how we’re going to handle everything else, but with YouTube we could still film videos as usual and even if we decided to take a hiatus it’s not as if you have the most stringent uploading schedule anyway.”

“Oi.” Dan looks thoroughly unamused. “I could say the same for you.”

Phil laughs. “You know what I mean. Doing what we do for a living is actually convenient when it comes to this. There’s no office we need to report to and no shift we have to open for. Even if you film at night, with lighting it wouldn’t make a difference and we communicate via e-mail anyway without anyone ever having to see us in person. Well, most of the time. For now, it can work. It’s not easy, but when has that ever stopped us before?”

“You bought a door gym and never used it because the assembly process was too hard.”

Now it’s Phil’s turn to look unamused as Dan smirks. “I should get abs when I exercise with it, not while putting it together, alright? It’s more complicated than it should be, really. Almost like that wardrobe we put together in your room when we first moved in here.”

“Yeah, look how long that lasted. Same with the chairs we used to have. I don’t know if that says something about the quality of the furniture or just our assembly skills.”

“Both probably.”

A resonant clap of thunder breaks over the house like an exploded firework and the lights momentarily flicker with the threat of a power outage before steadying. The wind picks up speed then, buffeting the rain against the side of the house with a drumming force that’s liable to leave dents in any cars parked outside when it’s over. They’re in the heart of the storm now and Phil’s not certain when the worst of it will be over. 

“I’m not sorry you know. Not for any of it,” Dan says under the volume of the rain and the thunder and there’s an unspoken message there Phil interprets to mean not as Dan rescinding his apology for the bite he’d inflicted earlier, but a fervent statement of resolve. I’m not sorry at all for having listened to you, it implies, for having met you, for having gone through this together, for having stayed. No matter what, I will never be sorry. Because it was us from the start and when it ends, whenever it ends, however it does and whatever happens, I will always be happy to have had this with you.

“Me either,” Phil murmurs.

In the small pocket of thunder which follows they share a glance, a silent accord of reassurance and an unspoken promise more powerful than the fulminous storm raging outside. We’re not a performance piece, Phil thinks as he remembers Teague’s words, we’re not on display for anyone and when we put on a show it’ll be on our terms, for ourselves, not for a court of vampires and not for anyone else. Whatever happens, it will still be about us. That will always be the plan.  
When they come together briefly it’s to exchange a feather touch of a kiss, soft and light, without the expectation for anything further than a brush of lips, but it’s electric to Phil all the same, coiling in his chest like a bloom of warm liquor before he pulls away.

“Well, go on,” he says, voice roughened by affection as he gestures at the shower, “before you have to bathe naked in the dark.”

“Mm, but think of the tub rave I could have with glow sticks.” Dan smiles and with another shared look Phil leaves the bathroom to allow him his much awaited shower.

He heads back up the stairs into the kitchen to find Teague with a wad of paper towels in hand studiously mopping up the excess water from his impromptu entry off the tiled floor.

“Didn’t realize how much water leaked off my clothing when I came in here.” Teague gestures at a soggy heap of more paper towels in the bin.

“No worries. Here. This’ll help.” Phil hands him the towel and Teague promptly scruffs it over his hair and across his face.

“Cheers for that. Feel a bit less like a drowned rat now.” When he pulls the towel away his hair is a nest of frayed curls and misplaced layers but he makes no effort to smooth it back into place. “You’ve got a nice place here. I seen a few angles of it from your videos, but it’s different seeing it in person. Has a more personable and comfy vibe.”

“Oh thanks. I guess everything looks different in person, doesn’t it?” An awkward silence follows and Phil pauses, floundering for something else to say. It’s like being stuck in a lift with another person, he thinks, feeling the urgent tension to say something to acknowledge the other’s presence and break the silence, but how did one exactly address a four hundred year old vampire? Teague looks so much like any other boy in a hoodie he’d seen walking through London on their way to work or university. There’s nothing about his attitude that’s threatening or superior, yet the very knowledge of what he was and how old he was is enough to intimidate Phil for a proper mode of conversation.

 _Well, if all else fails, just be polite._

He’s not sure if it’s another motherly maxim or if it’s just a phrase he’s thought of on his own, but he decides it’s sound advice to take in any situation, four hundred year old vampires in your kitchen or not.

“Do you…need anything? I’d offer you something to eat or drink but-”

Nah, it’s fine. I had my fill for the night already.” Teague finishes drying up the last puddled drops of water on the floor and drops the paper into the bin to join the rest. “Looks like you and him are getting on fine despite his diet change though. Even went out to buy more by the smell of it in here.”

“It wasn’t easy at first, but he needs it and I figured it’s not any different from when I had to buy lactose free milk.” Phil pauses. “Well, then again, it is different than being lactose intolerant, but it’s not so bad. The smell of it when it heats up though-”

“Is incredible right?” Teague’s expression lights up but then he quickly recovers upon realizing Phil doesn’t share his enthusiasm. “Oh right, human. Yeah, I suppose it smells rank to anyone who isn’t one of us. I have to say, you keep impressing me. You obviously hate the smell of it, but you went out of your way to buy and then prepare it. That’s dedication. Or love. Which is the same thing.”

“He’s my friend,” Phil says. “We’ve been through a lot in six years. I know that must not seem like much time to someone who’s immortal, but it’s enough time for us to have gone through rough patches and still be best friends. I just didn’t see why that had to change now.”

“Hey, no criticism from me. I’ve been around for centuries and I never had profound friendships what lasted that long for loads of reasons. It’s different, but more so rare when it comes to us. I don’t know if it’s reflective of the age we’re in now or if it just speaks volumes for the both of you.”  
Teague plays with the towel in his hands, looking down at it in distant reflection. “See, the Night Court only care about themselves, about intrigue and what can better serve their needs and vices. They’re old hands at gossip and malice. They don’t give a damn about people, only about how to manipulate them for sport. They don’t have any emotional responsibility to the vampires they make; they don’t believe it’s strictly important to a vampire’s potential, so the idea of friendship for the sake of it becomes irrelevant and strange. Some new bloods take that as an instinctual lesson in savagery or hate, but he didn’t. Came straight back home instead to work things out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they say home is where the heart is. Pretty sure in this case you’re the heart.”

Phil opens his mouth to reply and finds he’s not sure what to say. Another clap of thunder robs him of his next thought and the lights waver dangerously, but manage to hold on. As they flicker back to steady Dan’s voice trails up from the bathroom in a strident request for the storm to, ‘fuck off,’ and Phil laughs.

“I don’t know if I am the heart or not,” he says finally, “We’ve just decided to manage this together, however we can. I don’t know if that’s enough, but…he stayed, so I will too.”  
He leaves off his earlier preoccupations with self-doubt, but Teague quirks his head as if tuned to a radio frequency in which he can pick up the slightest changes of mood in the atmosphere around Phil’s body.

“I’m not keen about a lot of things, you know,” he says. “Even after a few hundred years of existence, you can still leave me guessing, but if I’m not mistaken, I’d say you’re more worried than you’re letting on. And not about him or the Night Court.” 

“Can you read minds?”

“Nah,” Teague waves the thought away. “He asked me that too when I met him. I could sense it on you if I tried, but if you live long enough like I have you learn how to read gestures, all the little tics of posture and facial expression that tell you all you need to know about a person and you look worried. When we spoke about the Night Court before, you were concerned, but you weren’t scared, which was interesting. Something’s bothering you, even though it’s hidden down deep.”

Teague’s expression is open, calm and Phil considers it for a moment before taking a breath and going ahead with it.

“I’m not looking for shallow flattery, I just…I’m not sure if this is enough- If being his best friend, if simply being ‘there’ is enough when I’m only human, only Phil. I know there’s nothing either of us can do, but it doesn’t stop me wondering if being a supporting presence isn’t just window dressing for implying I have nothing else to offer.”

“Ahh, I see what you mean.” Teague nods. “He’s unsure of how to make sense of what he is now and what that means for his future if he can’t figure himself out. You feel like everything and everyone is changing and you’re wondering if you shouldn’t too. If how you are now isn’t just getting in the way of everything else. Do I have that right?”

“Just about, yeah.”

“I’ve been there, mate. Industrial Revolution had half of London straining at the heels to adapt to a new modern way of living while the other half tried to hang onto their old traditions. For a vampire it’s particularly jarring. Suddenly the era you’d grown accustomed to is changing again right before your eyes. Buildings, streets and people you’d known for an age suddenly drift away or die off and you can’t do anything about it, but that’s the price we pay. An eternity to watch all familiar people and places fade with time while we stick around to watch it all happen

“What was it like,” Phil asks, fascinated to be speaking with someone who had seen London change from cobblestone streets and horse drawn carriages to all the technological advancements preceding the ones in the modern London he lived in. “I mean, if it’s alright to ask.”

“It’s fine. I don’t remember a lot, mind, we’re immortal but that doesn’t mean our memories are ever a hundred percent about everything. I once spoke with someone who lived in ancient Rome and he didn’t remember much about it, except for the murals he saw in brothels throughout the city. All the rest of it- politics, war, social issues-went right over his head. If you wanted to know what Nero was like in person-hell, if he knew-but if you wanted to know all the various sexual positions portrayed on a wall in mosaic at a brothel? He’s your man.” Teague laughs.

“I was around for when queen and country was king and country, but I remember the Industrial Revolution best, probably because so many interesting things were happening around that time. You had new infrastructure going up, new inventions for transport and new mechanical ways of producing goods what used to be made by hand. It was like the 1840’s version of Silicone Valley. Everyone was either excited about all the new advancements or putting up their best front to prevent it. Because thing was, everything about the city was changing. There are streets which existed back then that you can’t find on any map now. I remember back in the day, right along the Strand, Bear Yard used to be ‘The’ place to be if you were a vampire or at least one who didn’t mind getting their blood fresh from a slaughterhouse. Any vampire could drink their fill there; get what they needed quick and fresh, without having to worry about tracking a human and figuring out how to cover your tracks when you were done with them.” At Phil’s pale face, Teague quickly goes on. “Er- you know, it was complicated. You couldn’t just dispose a body and leave it in the street. Maybe a century or so ago no one would have batted an eyelash because hygiene and sanitation was so atrocious it would have been considered abnormal if a body wasn’t lying in the street. But with the Night Court, you could never leave a trace of your presence behind, because if you did, they’d find out and you’d disappear. Simple as that. Discretion was key.”

“The Bear Yard slaughterhouse however made it easy to get what we needed without the fuss even if other well-to-do vampires turned their noses up at us for it. I mean it was convenient, but it was filthy and smelly too. It was open for about thirty years until the new sanitation laws came ‘round and it closed down for good, which was probably just as well for everyone involved, but it was sad to see it go. But the place I really hated losing? Paternoster Row. It was a mecca of books the likes of which I haven’t seen since. It could have rivaled the Library of Alexandria. Well, maybe not. I wasn’t alive to see the library to know for sure, but Paternoster Row was incredible- an oasis where you could find nearly every subject imaginable. Then the bomb raids happened and it was lost to the Blitz overnight. Six million books went up like cheap tinder.” Teague snaps his fingers for emphasis. “Just like that. I think the war was the only thing that made me feel human again after so many years. We were just as vulnerable and frightened as the humans, subject to the same loss of life and home as anyone else. All it took was one bomb blast and we were all equal victims of disaster.”

Teague looks off towards the slatted blinds drawn across the window and the freshet of water streaming along the glass outside. “Thing with cities is you can always rely on ‘em to change, but when you’re a vampire, it’s difficult to keep up with that change. You can never really tell what will happen next. It’s like chaos theory, innit? Butterflies setting off hurricanes. Everything proceeds from the smallest actions like ripples in water to become a fucking thunderstorm. You can’t do much about it except act and get on with it from there. It’s all a bit overwhelming and fascinating. You’re on the precipice of discovery, you’re struggling to understand your place in it all while trying not to be in the way, of trying not to be hemmed down by your own insecurities and existence. I get it. I know what you mean. It’s all a lot to be keeping up with whether you’re human or not.”

“How did you cope with it,” Phil asks gently, “with all the changes, I mean. How did you figure out what to do?”

Teague shrugs. “That’s the $64,000 question. Wing it, is always my best guess in any situation. Take the risk and forge ahead even if you know fuck all about what’s going to happen. There’s no real strategy involved. They say the people that invested in Apple before it got big were clever, just like that man who invented Facebook or any wall street fat cat who turned an investment into a million dollar yield-sure you need a certain amount of savviness to do those things, but it wasn’t just cleverness, it was risk. Taking a chance even when they weren’t sure what would happen. Those are usually the cleverest people, the luckiest too even if luck is a bit arbitrary on its own. If it’s important enough to risk your involvement, then don’t run away from it. Take a chance on yourself and those you love- you’ll end up winning every time, even if at first it might not seem that way. It’s scary out there, even without things like us stalking the night. I seen things that’d make your skin turn green and things that’d make you think life was the sweetest trip and you couldn’t be gladder to be along for the ride. And with all of that- I still don’t think there’s a rhyme or reason to it at all. You never know if what you are will be enough to face the next big conflict, you just have to make do and face it with the best you have and most times you have everything you need.”

He gestures at the kitchen. “You made a home here, made a name for yourself and I’d bet a few thousand quid that you’ve made a great many people happy doing nothing less than exactly what you do. That’s better than I’ve ever done for myself or others in four hundred years.”

“So I’m a good entertainer.”

“You’re a good _person_. You’re committed to doing what you need to when you need to make things work and you’re committed to the people you love, more so when they show you they can be trusted with that love.”

“What if I’m not sure if goodness and charity is enough to keep up with everything that’s changing? You need more than just intent to make things work.”

Teague stares at him, working out his meaning and connecting it with the emotion he can sense behind Phil’s words. “You’re really saying you’re not sure if _you_ work anymore.”

Phil pauses to consider the idea. “…Something like that.”

“Let me ask you something-You didn’t think about this when you started making videos on the internet? I mean, depending on who you ask, being in front of a camera is either a lesson in narcissm or bravery. Whichever side you’re on, you gotta have nerve to contend with an audience made up of the vast anonymous world. That’s not easy. You want to talk about intent meaning nothing, try having your own intentions filtered back to you through the lens of a million lives, all with their own opinion of what you mean. And believe me, there’s nothing more fickle than public opinion. It’s like a line I read off this Terry Pratchett book once. ‘Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.’ You’re playing Scheherazade in a way. That never bothered you? If who you are and what you say can work long enough to hold their attention?”

“I-can’t say I really thought about it when I started, if I’m honest. I just knew I liked making the videos; cutting the footage together to make a story. I never thought it would get this far and over time I learned to ignore the worst comments and focus on what I wanted to do. Some parts of it are….limiting, in a way, but the rest has been like an adventure. I like it. It’s never boring, but with this-it’s different. I want to do something, help somehow and I just come away feeling hopeless about it.”

“Does he make you think that way?” Teague nods his head towards the empty doorway to indicate Dan in absentia.

“No.”

“And you care about him-he cares about you? Stuck around all this time, just like you said?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s your answer. He believes in you- he needs you, same as anyone who needs the comfort of someone that actually gives a damn because they made an effort to. He told you straight up what happened to him, you experienced a bit of the raw deal for yourself and you didn’t leave. Anyone else would call it foolish and maybe it is, but you’ve strong courage to the core to see it through anyway because you want to take the risk, because you care about him. Not because someone said you should or because it’s the right thing to do – but because you want to do it, because it comes as natural for you as breathing. You work just fine. Your light’s not hiding under a bushel, it’s blinding. He’ll remind you of that when things really get dire else he’s an idiot.”

“Who’s an idiot?” Dan walks into the kitchen barefoot, wearing a fresh pair of pyjamas and a towel slung over his shoulders. His damp hair is pushed back from his forehead and as Phil watches he self-consciously flattens a curling strand sneaking its way across his eyebrow.

“You are,” Teague says with smug cheer.

“Hypothetically,” Phil adds.

Dan looks between them, confused. “Okay…what did I do now?”

“Nothing. We were just having a pep talk.” Teague crosses his arms and smiles. “Reminding him things aren’t exactly hopeless and neither is he.”

Phil glances over and Dan holds the look, adds a silent meaningful response to show he agrees and though it’s only for the barest of seconds Phil comes away with the impression that they’ve just shared a more prolonged conversation.

“You’re both terrifying in a way, you know,” Teague says suddenly and they both turn to look at him with mirrored expressions of surprise on their faces. “You’re not even aware of it are you? The kind of power you have together?”

“You’re not going to start in about soul mates and the irrevocable pull of destiny joining two people together-” Dan begins with a sardonic tone, but Teague shakes his head emphatically.

“I don’t know about destiny or fate or soul mates, otherwise I’d have to think about how much of my own life was preordained by some outside sentient force and that’s uncomfortable. I think it’s a crock anyway. What I mean is, there’s an uncanny strength you both have when you’re together. Even if you weren’t a vampire you could feel it. I dunno. The way you both look at each other and speak without saying a word, it’s hard to get a word in edgewise and you haven’t said anything at all. I’ve seen it before, but you two-” Teague shakes his head again. “People affect each other like dominoes. During the war you had people infecting those around them with fear or courage or despair and it resonated with the same force as a bomb raid. Same goes for you. You prop each other up, become more confident and secure. You both might not be half of who you are now without the other around. Maybe you would have been at that, who knows, but you have strength together, enough to make you both want to stay and figure this mess out. I’d say, if you’re looking for how to cope with all this, your answer lies in each other.”

Dan appears to absorb the information in quiet contemplation, respectfully listening along. “I mean, it sounds good and hopeful and I know we’ve both come a long way together, but we’re talking about vampires, an enclave of ancient vampires no less, who currently have us holed up in the house because god knows what they’ll do to us if we step outside-I don’t think the 'power of friendship' is enough to really make a difference.”

“You’d be surprised the lengths people go to just for the sake of friendship, for the sake of the people they care about. It makes a difference. Don’t underestimate that.”

A gust of wind rattles the window and a flash of lightning illuminates the street like a flashbulb picture so that for a moment through the blinds Phil sees the houses opposite theirs in clear detail, before the darkness of the night and the storm returns with a rumbling crack of thunder.

“And don’t underestimate this storm either,” Teague says looking over at the window as well, “liable to get worse than this before it gets better.”

“You’re sure they won’t come into the house,” Phil asks. “If we have a black out or something, they won’t decide to drift in through the door or hover outside our windows?”

“Nah, I told you, they’re sticklers for their rules and traditions. They’ll most likely wait until the storm is over or you’re well away from home to do anything about it.”

They fall quiet, each contemplating the possibilities of what will happen when the storm finally abates and Phil becomes restless again with the silence and the frenetic edge of worry beginning to take its place.

“Let’s do something,” he announces without preamble. “We’re all stuck here for now, so let’s play a game. Mario Kart like we said earlier.”

“No shit? Really?” Teague’s face brightens and suddenly he looks every bit like a child with ice cream instead of a centuries old vampire. “I haven’t played that in ages. Used to win every time with Yoshi.”

“Only because you haven’t played against me,” Dan says.

Teague raises his eyebrows and laughs. “Kid, I’d beat you at 150cc and not break a sweat doing it.”

“Alright, so it’s settled. That’s what we’ll play tonight.” Phil steps out of the way to usher Teague into the hall and effectively welcome him into the house. As he goes through into the lounge, Phil begins to follow, but Dan stops him with a hand on his shoulder.

“ _Kid?_ ” Dan looks incredulous as he speaks in a harsh whisper. “He called me kid.”

“Said he could beat you without breaking a sweat either. Maybe you’re the one that’s going to need an ‘all or nothing’ save this time.”

Dan looks offended at the very idea and only stares as Phil turns around with a smirk and follows after Teague into the lounge. He goes to sort out the controllers and Dan makes it a point to enter and secure his position on the sofa with an air of territorial defiance while Teague comfortably settles for the armchair, drawing himself up in a cross-legged position after having left his shoes in the hall by the radiator. He looks gleeful when Phil hands him a controller, as if it had been not only ages since he’d played the game but ages more since he’d enjoyed a night in with friends.

“You’re not going to go off and dry your hair then?” Phil takes a seat opposite Dan on the sofa after setting up the television and glances over at the wavy quiff of hair on his head.

“What’s the point if I’m not going anywhere? It’s not like anybody’s going to see me. I’ll leave it for later or tomorrow.” Dan trains his stare on the screen to select his character.

“Right. You just really want to win this race, don’t you?”

 _Kid!_ Dan mouths the word soundlessly at Phil and he chokes back a laugh as they continue selecting their vehicles and the game starts.  
It’s a close few matches between Dan and Teague as they come neck and neck to the finish line with an unspoken rule to not use any items, but for a change, it’s Teague who ultimately wins each race with an air of nonchalant delight, enjoying the game along with Phil as Dan’s shoulders tense with the effort of trying to reclaim his title of victor. Even his hair seems to be curling at the edges with every loss, like a perturbed cat with its hackles raised.

Phil notices and leans over to him in between one match to offer a murmured word of support. “It’s just a game?”

“Yeah-I know.” Dan nods, eyes still trained on the screen, before glancing up with a quick smile. The rest of the game proceeds with an easier air of comfort as Dan segues into a resigned lax position against the sofa cushions and ends up winning the race before he’s even aware of crossing the finish line. The room erupts into a mingled yell of defeat from Teague and one of victory from Dan that overpowers the sound of another clap of thunder in the sky. They carry on discussing the race in the same spirited fashion and it takes another few minutes for anyone in the room to realize that someone is knocking at the door. Phil notices first and as he freezes with the controller outstretched in front of him in the middle of placing it on the coffee table, Dan picks up on his alarm and stops mid-sentence as Teague follows suit.

Another knock. Louder this time.

“Human,” Dan says at the same time as Teague and then clarifies further, “our neighbor actually.”

“You’re sure?” Phil listens intently as if he could also sense whether the person was human or not if he only concentrated long enough.

“Very sure. I can hear his heartbeat.” Dan stands up from the sofa. “I’ll go check it out. Maybe we were too loud or something. That’s all we need-an ASBO for Mario Kart.”

He leaves the room and Phil waits, nerves still on edge despite knowing it was only their neighbor. He can only just make out Dan’s voice conferring in a low casual tone at the door downstairs, a small laugh, a pause-then-  
“Phil?” He calls up the stairs. “Did you…leave your phone in a cab?”

“Oh!” Phil darts up from the sofa and rushes over to the banister. “I did! I forgot to tell you. I didn’t realize until I came home. Why?”

Dan shares a word of thanks with their neighbor before shutting the door and coming to the foot of the stairs while struggling to put on a pair of his trainers in the hall. “He was saying he’d just got home and unlocked the door at the same time as a cab pulled up and the driver asked if he knew someone who lived here who’d left their phone in a cab. Said this was his last stop before his shift was over and he remembered the passenger looking at the same phone with a weird yellow case.”

“That’s my lemongrab one,” Phil says.

“Yeah, well, he said as he was on his way back home through here, he’d try dropping it off first before turning it into the police.”

“That’s great! I thought I’d lost it for good.”

“They’re still downstairs at the front door. I’ll go get it.” Dan finishes putting on his trainers and looks up to notice Phil’s concerned expression. “It’s literally just the front door, I’m not stepping outside. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay. Just be careful.”

Dan gives a curt wave of acknowledgement and leaves out the door and down the stairs. From the lounge, Phil overhears a muttered curse and he returns to find Teague engrossed in a single player race.

“Alright?” Teague doesn’t look up from the screen as he takes a tight curve of a turn and dodges a banana peel.

“Fine. I left my phone in a cab and the driver remembered me as the passenger he’d dropped off here and wanted to return it.”

“That’s lucky. I end up losing every phone I manage to get. Another reason why I don’t have many friends. They can never get in touch with me. Then of course when most of them are humans, you don’t have long to be with them until they realize you’re not getting any older while they’re not getting any younger. Can’t just tell people what I am, so I always end up having to start over with a new group of friends and repeat the process which is why most times I never bother.”

Phil stares at him as he nonchalantly continues playing. “That sounds lonely."

“It is. But I’m used to it. Just one of those things we have to go through I suppose. Most other vampires are either few and far between or just not worth trusting at all except to exchange a word in passing and go our separate ways.”

“You can be our friend.”

Teague hesitates and his vehicle onscreen catches a corner, skidding off the track. He pauses the game then and studies Phil with a searching look.  
“I can see why he loves you so much,” he says finally. “I only known you for a few minutes and you made me feel at home, like I’d known you for years and you didn’t care what I was, even if you were wary at the start.”

“Dan trusted you. You helped him that first night and you came to help us both now. Like any friend would. Or a good one anyway.”

“So this…would be alright with you? Me being a friend, I mean, hanging out like this with you both?” 

“Yes,” Phil says. “Would that be alright with you?”

Teague hesitates before answering, staring ahead as if wondering if it truly was alright. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. It’d be nice to just be around people and not have to be so careful about revealing something I don’t want them to know when they already understand. It feels different for a change. Comfortable. Thanks.”

“Maybe don’t call Dan ‘kid’ though. Especially not when it comes to Mario Kart.”

“Ha-! Alright, I won’t injure his pride. I thought he was going to bend the controller in half during the last lap of that race.” Teague laughs. “Taking his time isn’t he? Or did he decide he couldn’t win a rematch?”

A car door slams outside and Phil listens to it move off down the road and away into the rain.

 _Probably the cab pulling away just now_ , he thinks.

He listens for Dan’s tread up the stairs, but as time continues to pass without a reappearance, he frowns and moves towards the door to call down.

“Dan?”

A grumble of thunder and a skirl of wind answer.

Teague sets down the controller, head tilted at an angle as he listens along and then in a flurry of motion he bolts from the sofa and races past Phil’s shoulder like a fleet ghost, disappearing down the stairs before Phil can say a word. He quickly follows, bounding down the stairwell and out into the hall to their front door where Teague is already stood in the entryway. The door has been left open to the raging storm and a gust of wind drags in a needling sheet of rain down the hall, drenching Phil at once and catching Teague with the worst of it as he stands directly on the threshold. The intensity of it is painful and Phil is forced to move aside from the trajectory of the open doorway, but Teague continues to stand in place, immobile and mute, looking out into the dark thicket of rain.

“Teague?” Phil calls over the sound of the storm, but receives no answer. He looks down at the floor then, his gaze caught by a flash of yellow and his heart does a double-time trot as he darts over to collect his phone.

“ _Teague!_ ”

Finally, he turns, pale face drenched and dismayed and Phil already knows what he’s going to say before he says it.

“He’s gone. They’ve taken him.”

### ❧❧❧❧

_It’s like a hurricane_ , Dan thinks as he heads down the hall.

He stops before the door and listens as a downpour of rain pounds against it like a crowd of people slamming the frame with their fists all at once. It’s then he briefly wonders about the sanity of a driver opting to stop by a passenger’s house to drop off a phone at the height of a dangerous storm, but in the end he supposes maybe it was best to just accept the stroke of good luck for what it was and hope the driver could make it back home safely for the trouble. He grabs the doorknob and steels himself for the gale force wind outside, but even with his new strength the door is yanked out of his hand with a force that threatens to tear the hinges out of the wall. It rocks forward again with a pendular momentum and before it can slam shut in his face, a figure in a black raincoat steps onto the threshold, catching the door effortlessly with one hand as he stumbles back in surprise.

“You’re not a terribly difficult person to find, Mr. Howell.” A hand reaches up to pull back the hood of the coat and the figure, a woman, shakes her head to dislodge the stray beads of rain clinging to the mantle of dark hair falling at her back. “I wasn’t sure if the phone that cabbie was trying to return belonged to you, but I thought I’d take it from him anyway and wait and see who showed up for it.”

“I’m sorry?” Dan says it automatically, his nerves live wired to a point of alarm, puzzled over why the woman disturbed him so much. She looks slight and unassuming; face pleasantly calm as she looks at him, but there’s something about her mien and the timbre of her voice that sets off every instinctual warning of danger in his body.

“We’re well past the point for apologies wouldn’t you say? Usually we spend a bit more time trying to find wayward new bloods, but you weren’t a challenge at all. Thankfully.”

_Trying to find…wayward…new bloods._

The woman registers the dawning realization on Dan’s face at the same time as it occurs to him who and what she is.  
“Yes, I’m from the Night Court. You should be honored. It’s usually a steward we send to collect people. One-on-one visits are rare, but everyone’s talking so much about you, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see what all the commotion was about. I’m Eris by the way.”

She extends a hand and smiles and Dan thinks of how strange it was that one simple gesture could convey such a clear and present threat.

_Eris. I’ve heard that name before…in the alleyway, when that vampire, Ashton, was talking to Phil-_

“Well? Don’t be rude on top of defiant.” The smile is rigid and fixed on her face like a Noh mask as she keeps her hand extended out for Dan to shake.

He takes it carefully, slipping his palm into hers with all the temerity of sticking his hand in a mousetrap, more afraid of what would happen if he didn’t comply. She squeezes his hand gently, but doesn’t let go.

“Now we’re all acquainted with each other. When Ashton described you, I expected a brute of a new blood, some hard headed thug without finesse, but you’re quite different aren’t you?” Her hand applies another degree of pressure. The other continues to hold the door open against the rain thundering behind her. “Which is even more interesting. What do you say we take a ride? You’re not exactly presentable, but we’ll make do.”

Dan pulls away from her grip, but her fingers clench down with the barest twitch and it’s like being pulled into the steel maw of a machine.

Now, of course, you _could_ call for them.” She follows his gaze as he glances up the empty stairwell. “I can see your intention as if it were written in majuscule on your shirt. You really should work on that you know. You can’t dissemble a single feeling before it flits across your face plain as day.”

Her fingers clench further still and his mouth opens in a small cry of pain as he tries and fails to wrench his hand away.

“You could call them, as I’ve said, but you really don’t want that, Daniel. It’d be tedious for me to deal with them and horrifying for you to watch. If you just come with me, it’d be easier.”

“I’m still in the house,” he’s rambling past the pain in his hand, grasping at straws. “You can’t-You’re not supposed to-”

“I’m not supposed to what? Talk to you and convince you to come with me?” When her fingers clench down again he swears he hears his knuckles crack. “You can always decide you don’t want to. I’m sure this meeting isn’t a convincing motivator, but let me tell you a story. We’ve become exceptionally good at hiding any evidence of our presence from the public and from any private agencies that might be more invested in researching us than the average crackpot theorist on an internet forum. We confiscate anything that might endanger our anonymity, be it camera footage, written accounts or people. When it’s another vampire being careless, we deal with them as we see fit and we would have done the same in the case of the flower shop and that owner being killed right in view of the surveillance cameras, but as it was Yilmaz…well..” she trails off and shrugs and her hand squeezes further.

“The authorities think the cameras malfunctioned and there was no footage to be found, but you know what’s funny, Daniel? We do still have some left and Yilmaz wasn’t the only person captured on that tape. What clips remain show a certain tall young man, much like yourself, prowling through the shop well after hours, certainly only a few hours after the owner died. For it to end up on the detective chief inspector’s desk would be damnable evidence, wouldn’t you say? Well, you studied law, I suppose you could tell me all about it.”

“You can’t do that.” His voice is rasped to his own ears, strained with the bone crackling pain in his hand.

““Yes, I can. You could say making discord is my calling.”

She twists his hand, the smile never leaving her face and his knees almost buckle with the extraordinary bolt of pain which seizes his arm. “So, what’s it to be? Do I strong arm you out the door now? Or do you go back upstairs to deal with the inevitable fallout of seeing your name and face on the evening news tomorrow as a suspect of interest? You can stay here and hide from us, but not from the rest of the world. And if you try to flee, you give up everything- your home, your career, your friends, your family-forever to be an obscure point of relevance and an eternal pariah to anyone who ever knew you, including him.”

She doesn’t clarify who she means, but Dan already knows. The rain stings his face and the power of the hand crushing his is overwhelming, but her promised threat is more significant than either. If he stays, it won’t only be him damaged by the fallout, Phil would be dragged into it as well, forced to answer inquiries, asked if he suspected something was wrong, accused of aiding and abetting, hounded by media and police alike until the scandal eroded their mutual livelihoods and social circles to nothing. He could go and risk whatever worst pain might follow when he appeared before the Night Court or stay and risk the pain of losing everything else.

“Okay. I’ll go. I’ll go.”

She releases his hand and now her smile looks genuinely pleased. “I knew you were reasonable. Let’s be off then, the car is right outside.”

He steps out into the howling mix of the storm and looks back to see Eris slip Phil’s phone out of her pocket and toss it to the floor, before pulling up her hood and joining him on the pavement next to the sleek black Rolls Royce pulled to the curb. She opens the passenger door, ushering him inside and he clambers onto the seat, a sodden mess of wet pyjamas clinging to his skin as Eris follows after with practiced elegance despite the drenched state of her coat and heels.

The door slams shut, trapping him inside with the enigmatic darkness of her stare and as the car drives on into the rain and the wind, he thinks, _yes, just like a hurricane_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it's been a while.
> 
> I wasn't sure if I'd ever get around to updating this story, soon or ever.  
> First, due to health concerns with myself and family members which drew away any attention or motivation I had for writing more and then because it's difficult for me to reconcile myself to writing about two very real people. I always feel like I need to preface each chapter with a disclaimer noting: 'the views expressed in the story are not necessarily the way the author views the real people on whom the au characters are based.' (even saying 'au characters' is jarring.) It's only fanfiction and it's not a story meant to be taken seriously, but when I'm drafting and thinking of scenarios and dialouge it's weird for me to think, 'would he say that or do this thing or think this way' in the same way I would for a story populated with characters I'd created myself. There's an element about it, for me personally, for me as the person writing this, that feels strange and disrespectful. I don't know. Ultimately it means nothing, it's a story that exists in the abstract for the passive enjoyment of any potential readers and I think I only draw a small comfort from the fact that D+P don't read this, but there's an element about it that feels more underhanded and belittling for all of that and I quickly lose interest in writing further. I hope I expressed myself well with this. I know there's prolific amounts of stories featuring them from a variety of p.o.v's and au's and it's all just meant as a community of writers projecting their ideas and hopes onto two people that have personal resonance for whichever reason, but it's just something that always comes to mind. I try to write it with some self-awareness, but for what it is, I wonder if that even matters.  
> And like I wrote Phil to say in the story, they -are- more than just a performance piece for whatever imaginative scenarios or ideas surround them, but it's surreal to write and direct them through the story as if they were two dimensional instead.  
> But I'm rambling.
> 
> Thank you for the comments left while I was away, thank you for any new readers and any returning ones. I hope this chapter was worth the wait.
> 
> Notes on the Story:
> 
> * I tried to include three chapters in one again as I did for Phil's previous chapter to make up for the long absence. I'm not sure how well the narrative flows in this however. Some lines felt contrived when I read them back, but it was difficult to sit down and edit through like I'd normally do, so I hope something sticks. The chapter itself was written over the space of all the months I've been away and updated accordingly to accomodate current details and events. For anyone who went to Tatinof for example, I included a few things you might find familiar. [easter egg unlocked] as well as other things..
> 
> * Heavy-handed butterfly and hurricanes symbolism-check
> 
> * There really is a Ginger Pig on Moxon Street and there realy is a youtube channel called dakotalapse as Susan mentioned in her conversation. There are many pho restaurants around London, but not one specifically close to Moxon Street.
> 
> * n the 1850's Bear Yard along Holborn and Strand was a slaughterhouse which according to 'Lost London' was a 'filthy, yard occupied by tallow-makers, cowkeepers, slaughtermen, tripe-boilers and stables. The last of which closed in 1889 when the yard was taken over by other trades. Over 300-400 sheep and 50-60 bullocks were butchered here weekly.'
> 
> * Numerous Buffy references-check
> 
> * For the cabbie's dialouge on Manchester United, I researched a few details, looked up a few videos and tried to piece together something that sounded believable for someone who religiously watched the game might say, but if you do watch football, specifically United and your first thought on reading that part was, 'what the hell??" don't worry, that was my entire thought process while writing it.
> 
> * For the references to the book, The Talisman, I'd always thought as Phil is a fan of Stephen King, and in the context of the story, he would have come across this book at some point and (hopefully) liked it. Speaking aside of the chapter, the book on its own is a great read and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it yet. If you ask me my favorite of anything I'll waffle into the stratosphere, but when it comes to books, that one is my favorite.
> 
> * I find it notoriously difficult to write from Phil's p.o.v (not that I have an inherent understanding of either of their thought processes as individuals to say I could 'write' one better than the other) but it's just more so with Phil and even as I try to develop his thoughts and actions in the context of the story I always wonder if his portrayal falls flat. (but then the same could be said for Dan too..) I just hope in the end, some part of his 'voice' shines through.


	8. Ferula Gemini: Part I

 

  
_We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us._  
― Jean-Paul Sartre

 

 

“You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“That’s fair. I’m still going anyway.”  
With that, Phil eases his arms into the sleeves of his jacket, straightens the collar and briskly tugs the pull of the zipper up to his neck with a sharp fricative buzz to punctuate his intent.

It’s difficult to see the face Teague pulls in the darkness of the room, but by the strangled noise he makes in the back of his throat Phil’s sure it isn’t one of approval. It’s difficult to make out much of anything at all in the room except silhouettes and shadows. His mobile rests face down on the coffee table with its torch shining up towards the ceiling of the lounge in a small coronal glow of castoff light, the only illumination left in the flat after a sizzling white flash of lightning had exploded over the street, igniting a transformer into overload, promptly blacking out every streetlamp and building on the block. Teague paces a tight circle of frustration at the edge of the torch’s reach as he’s done for the past ten minutes, oscillating between light and dark, hands curled into the tangled mess of his hair still damp from where he’d stood on the threshold of the entryway downstairs, staring out into the rain as if Dan might rematerialize like a restless spirit between a stroke of lightning and a throttling gust of wind until Phil had gently guided him back up the stairs into the flat proper. Since then, the conversation between them hasn’t changed. Phil continues to quietly state his decision to venture out into the swirling rage of the storm in an impulsive bid to find Dan and bring him back home and every time he says it Teague blusters further into a state of agitated nerves as he tries and fails to convince Phil of the guaranteed promise of disaster.

“No, no, no!” Teague stops in the middle of his restless stride from the fireplace to the armchair and leans forward, gesticulating with angry, empty swipes of air over the torch’s beam and this time Phil can see the harsh interplay of shadow and light across his face twist his expression into a gargoyle’s frantic snarl.  
“Are you listening to me? You don’t just waltz up to the court and expect them to hand him over, safe as houses, no harm done. This isn’t some late night drama where the hero is conveniently handed the means to save their friends from the weekly big bad.”

“Big Bad…You’ve watched Buffy?”

“God’s sake-!” Teague’s hands bunch into fists in his hair as if prepared to rip tangles out in clumps. “Yes, alright? Most of us have. We laugh whenever the clichés are too ridiculous to take seriously and change the channel when it hits too close to home-the point is, if you go, you’ll die and you don’t seem to understand that.”

He did understand. The certain probability of mortal injury, of bridging the point of no return, is a clear defined thought in his mind. The problem was he couldn’t be bothered to care very much about it.

 _Further to the point_ , Phil thinks, _I’m not sure there’s any room left to think or feel anything else compared to everything I’ve experienced in the past twenty four hours._

Fear, denial, confusion, uncertainty, curiosity and affection-he’d cycled through the full range of all possible combinations of emotional responses and in their wake, now facing the knowledge that Dan had been taken to face the threat of the Night Court alone, rather than feeling like an assailable wreck without recourse or direction, he’s left with a pall of calm so utter and complete he feels nothing at all except for the imperative priority to move, to go, to leave the flat, to brave the storm, to find Dan and bring him back home. Conviction finds a home in the upper cavity of his ribcage, seizing his heart in a breakneck pace of a beat to overpower the thrum and crash of thunder outside. The impulse of it settles just beneath the skin like a contained fever instilling every nerve to action, overriding the idea of self-preservation, leaving him only with the clear and persistent thought of getting to Dan by whatever means necessary. When faced with a crisis, Phil thought, there was no use standing around agonizing over it, wallowing in self-pity to the point of inaction until the crisis festered into a catastrophic overload. One had to act, even if the action narrowed down to nothing but the most primitive of all survival instincts, to flee or to fight. Phil considers maybe he was doing both. Fleeing the dark confines of the flat to fight the storm and whatever else might be waiting for him in the inconstant night. It was foolish and stupid and maybe he was more than a bit mad as Teague had suggested, but it feels like the only good right option left to him where nothing else seems viable. It’s the same ingrained instinct he’d felt on first talking to Dan when they had still been separated by miles of distance, united through the reliable glow of a computer screen by an urge to satisfy the magnetic itch for communication between them until it had become a bond as ineffable and inseparable as a Borromean knot. Years later that bond still held true and in the harsh light of his mobile’s torch Phil can see evidence of it in every corner of the room, in every echoed reflection of Dan’s picture in frames on the shelves, in his old pair of trainers set against the wall, in his drum set by the corner, in the well-worn cushions on his side of the sofa, in the sensory memory of his mouth on Phil’s skin and his fangs in Phil’s arm. He’s a persistent living ghost, an irrepressible presence of a kind Phil is in no hurry to dismiss or forget if it were even possible to try.

In any other instance, as a latent observer uninvolved and far removed from the immediacy of the moment, he might agree with Teague and question his own sanity in facing down a parliament of conniving elder vampires, but right now he’s never felt more certain about what he means to do. It’s a light, freeing, clearheaded sensation, something like prevision, that reminds him of standing outside his old family home on a winter’s day after the first true snowfall, when the world resembled a settled snow globe and the air was mentholated and crisp and every breath cleared his sinuses so that even the very act of living, of thinking, of simply being, seemed effortless and pure. There’s no internal argument to be had, no second guessing himself, no laboring over a laptop for googled solutions and theories to combat self-doubt or uncertainty. Now there’s only the precedent, the urgency, the driving impetus to leave through the door and bring Dan back home.

Something’s missing, his subconscious reminds him and he thinks, _of course, of course it is. It’s Dan, it’s peace of mind, it’s our wellbeing and tonight I’m getting them back._

“I’m not staying alone in a house Dan might never return to,” he says finally. “We moved in here together and when I leave now we’re coming back together or not at all.”

Teague pauses in the middle of another tightly paced circle to stare at him with an expression verging on reverential terror.  
“You really are out of your fucking mind.”

An ear splitting report of thunder shivers the flat through every inch of its foundations and as the echoes die off to grumbling mutters, the rain intensifies into heavy clots of water drumming against the windows, trembling the glass in its panes with an underscored urgency to suggest the storm wouldn’t soon abate and that every moment which passed was a missed chance to know what was happening to Dan or where exactly he was at this very second.

_No time, no time._

It’s the dark in the tunnel again, the assured rage of the storm and the uncertain threat of those who had taken Dan, all of them true present dangers no one would fault him to avoid, but he’s well past the point of considering leaving well enough alone to even be a choice.

Phil stoops down to retrieve his phone with the resolved intent to leave, but Teague snatches his wrist in a calculated grip of cold pressure to stop him.

“No, just hang on, alright? You need to stop and think about this. You don’t have a clue where you’re going or what you’re going to do when you get there.”

“I’m tired of waiting and I’m tired of thinking,” Phil says. “Just tell me where he’s being taken and I’ll worry about the rest when I get to it.”

Teague’s face is an anguished portrait of worry, pained and desperate as he continues to hold Phil’s wrist in check with a force that belies the potential of his fingers to crush bones to powder in his fist. “Look-you’re not listening to me. You’re acting on pure impulse and that might be well and good anywhere else, but with the court it’s dangerous.”

“I’m willing to take that risk.”

“You don’t know half the risks, mate. You’re going into a battlefield blind. You’re a human walking into the middle of things like us who stopped being anything remotely human a long time ago. That’s more than just a risk. It’s a death wish.”

“I already understand that.” Phil holds up his other arm where the pinpoint scars of Dan’s bite still mark his skin like a subtle tattoo. “It’s not a discussion anymore, Teague.”

“It bloody well should be. You think you understand, but you don’t. Not where the court is concerned. How are you going to convince them to give him back? To leave him alone? To leave you both alone? What are you going to do when you find him?”

“I don’t know!” Phil’s voice booms in the lounge, a full throated bellow of the quiet fury steeping in his chest, so loud and forceful Teague loosens his grip at once in surprise.  
The volume of his voice is surprising even to himself, more so the quicksilver anger behind it, but he knows the anger isn’t directed at Teague or his reasonable oppositions but rather towards the critical nature of the moment, towards all the circumstances which had led to him feeling cornered here in the dark of the flat, anxious with the need to bring things back to their original order of levity and calm, to push back against all such creatures or people that would try to disrupt the path of his life with unwelcome intrusions.  
It’s an unpleasant sensation of restriction and confinement, greater than being a child trying to find his way through school while looking up to a brother he’d seen as more accomplished, more athletic, more aware and more capable of meeting the world than him. It was greater still than being an adult who had gone on to create a small world of his own in the public milieu with all its latent dangers and threats and surmounting them all. It was his life, it was Dan’s and if he didn’t rise to the occasion now to defend and reclaim it, the chance to resume their life on their own terms, no matter how varied or strange it might be from now on, would be gone forever. Just as Dan himself might be gone forever if he didn’t move to act before the moment of opportunity slipped from his grasp. It was the only goal which mattered now, no matter how nebulous the process for achieving it might actually be.

 _But then again_ , Phil thinks, _when did we ever have a concrete handle on what we were doing? Wasn’t it always just us fumbling along with a camera and our intent, making do as we went along and taking advantage of each moment as it presented itself? Why does it have to be any different now?_

“I don’t know what to do,” he says again in a tone more subdued but no less resonant. “Who’s supposed to know what to do in a situation like this? Or in any critical situation? That night in the alley I don’t think Dan understood any better about what he was walking into, but he dared to move anyway, he dared to try, to put up a fight for me, for my sake and I mean to return the favor, however I can.”

Phil stares across the beam of the torch light and he’s dimly aware of his shadow arcing high across the ceiling and over the far wall in a statuesque silhouette eclipsing the room. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I don’t think I ever have really. I just get on with it and usually that’s enough.”

Teague shakes his head emphatically. “Not anymore. Not here. Just you against the court-”

“You said we had a certain kind of power, a certain kind of strength when we’re together and if that’s true, then it’s only one more reason to not let him face this alone. I’ll not change my mind.”

Silence falls, deafening and absolute in the wake of his declaration, broken only by the sustained malcontent of the storm. Teague’s previous objections wither away to resignation and he stands mutely in the darkness, head bowed as if Phil were possessed of an effulgence too terrible to look at straight on without the threat of being blinded.

“I mean to go and I’m going. Now.” Phil picks up his phone, torch still aimed at the ceiling. “Just tell me where they’ve taken him.”

“I don’t know.”

“Teague…I’m not playing at begging you to tell me. Just tell me.”

“I’m not being funny! Honestly. Truth is-no one knows where the court is.” Teague rustles his hair in harried frustration.  
“It’s not like they have one motherhouse where they always convene like Westminster Abbey or some shit. They have meeting places all over London. One week it could be a stodgy club like White’s on James Street, the kind old boys and puffed up toffs like to visit; the next week it could be an old bomb shelter turned underground dance club or a multi-million pound mansion on the outskirts of the city. What I’m saying is they could be miles away by now or just a few blocks over, but I’d never know. That’s part of their security. Better for people to never have an exact idea of where they are. History taught us that mobs always tend to be attracted to places of power, to the tallest castles and the most notorious buildings, so they divvied up their locations so that no one but a member of the court would ever know where they were going to be. Hard to establish an uprising when you can’t find the people you’re trying to rise up against.”

Phil’s heart sinks and cold dread seeps in to fill the space between his lungs. “So that’s it then. He’s gone. Just like that.”

“There are some places we could try, but we don’t have time to be cruising around London in this mess checking each one and hoping he’s behind door number three.”

“We?” Phil stares as Teague resumes his pacing circuit in front of the coffee table.

“Yes, ‘ _we._ ’ Can’t just let you muddle along without helping you after I told you I would. I just thought it’d be more like helping you both lay low until they lost interest and moved on, but things are different now. You need someone who understands a little better about what to expect when you meet them if you really mean to go like you say.”

“I do.”

Teague sighs. “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of.”

He turns in another broken circle, muttering under his breath, still visibly caught between his own misgivings and Phil’s unwavering stubbornness. Then, he pauses before a backdrop of lightning and turns his head to level a stare that instantly shatters any illusion of the youth who had only moments before indulged in Mario Kart without a care. In an instant he’s eldritch and severe, an ancient creature peering out at the world through the borrowed disguise of a human’s face, its features harrowed with all the travails implicit with immortality.

“If we do this, we don’t play by halves. We do this all the way. You’re committed to this through and through, whatever happens, even if it’s the worst and it probably will be. I’ll help you, but you must understand you can’t turn back. Once we leave this house, once we step out into the storm and into their midst- your life, your entire sense of security, is forfeit. You’ll have to fight to get them back. For him and for you. They won’t let you walk away once you decide to do this, so I’ll ask you again, are you sure this is what you want?”

For a moment Phil’s transported back to the claustrophobic musty confines of the garden shed, to the tenuous suspense of a time when he’d been twelve, corralled by the slatted light pouring through the wood beams, looked on by a group of boys gathered around him waiting for him to speak as he’d faltered in silence for a decision. He isn’t twelve anymore however and this isn’t about feigning interest in cigarettes to gain him a mark for initiative with The Boys. This was much greater than being a child and weighing each decision with the marker of inexperience and proving himself through overwhelming doubt. This was about him as Phil Lester braving the dark undercurrents of the unknown, casting himself into the middle of a situation where being simply human, simply Phil, held no guarantee of victory.  
Circumstances had changed to encompass impossible odds and unprecedented transformations, neither of which Teague offers an attempt to candy-coat into anything other than the dangerous reality it was. To freely accept the challenge, to take himself and all his insecurities, strengths and weaknesses in tow to face down things beyond his comprehension would be to relinquish every established creature comfort; to waive all rights to personal welfare and safety. And if he had the luck and wherewithal to return home safe and sound another suggestion hangs in the air that he would no longer be the same person he was now, just as he was no longer the same person he had been years ago with a head of long hair down to his jawline, those early days when he’d brimmed over with an experimental, exuberant energy that had over time distilled itself down to a more exacting version of who he was today. If he returned at all, he too would be changed irrevocably, the same way he supposed that rocks under enough duress of pressure could turn to diamonds or perhaps the way diamonds could in their turn crumble under greater forces than those which had initially made them.

Once he left the house, once he dared to go out into the storm after Dan, if they returned, their lives would no longer be the same, even if on the surface it might appear no different to less discerning eyes.  
To be alone, to re-establish himself without Dan, was always an option, to find someone else to fill the gap of absence Dan would leave behind might be difficult, but not impossible to conceive even if Phil already knew that in a crowd of would be facsimiles no one would ever come close to being Dan than Dan himself. No one could replace a person after all, especially not when they’d entrenched themselves in his memories with a force as essential and crucial as a heartbeat, but given time he could try to move on with his life and reestablish another kind of normalcy which was safer and quieter and less imposing than what he would face if he insisted on a life where they met the nights together rather than apart. Neither choice was easier than the other, in both he’d be asked to sacrifice something, to adapt to significant losses and overwhelming changes. They’d done much the same before, surviving public scrutiny and each other as they forged ahead with their ambitions, exchanging the small security of anonymity for a place behind a camera and a mixing console while learning when to compromise and when to listen to each other. It hadn’t been easy, but they’d succeeded. Together.

It’s impossible to imagine a future where Dan had no part in his life, not when they’d established an accord of trust with one another unparalleled to anything he’d ever shared with someone else before and one Phil believes he’d be disinclined to share with someone else who wasn’t Dan. He had friends and acquaintances he appreciated in equal measure, people with their own unique brand of humor and welcoming personalities he gravitated towards, but with Dan there had always been a distinct complexity and depth to who he was, a certain bite to his wit and laughter that was never boring and all too easy to enjoy. Phil had found it something of a relief the way their personalities and interests merged into a natural convergence where they could both settle into the comfort of being at once so odd and strange and so in tune to one another.  
Given the choice now, Phil is hard-pressed to accept any scenario where he was alone without Dan somewhere close at his side. Losing him would be to lose a part of himself.

But then, a thought occurs to him, intrusive and alarming: _Beware he is Apollo._

It’s the cryptic warning of his old nightmare on the train, as morbid and threatening as visions of redrum scrawled in blood on a haunted hotel's walls, revisiting him with an urgent plea to reconsider his answer, as if to suggest Dan was a monstrous version of that same archaic god, possessed of an otherworldly potential to ravage and destroy him as aptly as those of Apollo’s own consorts who had gone on to meet disastrous or ignominious fates.

 _It’s not as if he couldn’t_ , Phil thinks, _I already know what he’s capable of. It wouldn’t take very much at all for him to destroy me if he really wanted to._

But in many ways he’d already been consumed by the searing warmth of Dan’s irrepressible nature, of all the things which made Dan unlike any other person he’d ever met or would ever likely meet again. He was a person who encompassed more than the worst opinions of his most embittered detractors, who was more than the simplified caricatures of his channel’s branding, wholly unlike any resemblance to a creature or a god of myth or legend and it’s that Dan, the one who could never bear comparison to anyone or anything else, the one who stayed, who tried, who cared, that he means to risk his life for.

To hell with nightmares and cryptic omens, to hell with all the things he doesn’t know. There would never be a time when he could profess to be certain of anything, but of Dan he has always been certain and in a world where everything else has changed, that confidence would always remain the same.

It’s that heady clarity of assuredness, like cold winter air sliding down his throat and expanding his lungs, which galvanizes him against fear and when he looks up he doesn’t hesitate and he doesn’t flinch as he meets the dark solemnity of Teague’s hallow-eyed stare.

“Yes. I’m sure.” His answer is swift and intractable. “I want to find him. I want to bring him back home.”

Teague blinks and takes his measure for a time before clearing his throat and looking away towards the drawn blinds over the windows where flashes of lightning briefly illuminate the silhouettes of buildings across the street like ancient shadow play against the weft of the fabric.

“Right,” he says after another moment. “Soon as I saw you two, I always figured it’d be through hell and high water for you both, even if that last part might be literal by the time this storm is through.”

Teague looks at him then as if he were the eldritch vampire in the room, a looming presence of a sort not to be contended with.  
“I said you both had some kind of power together, but it’s there even when he’s not. It’s strong. I don’t think I really understood until now. You’d have made a fair good vampire yourself, you know. Some people don’t have the constitution for it. They lack the stamina and the courage. You though…” Teague shakes his head and smiles. “I always heard it said courage is just an overabundance of conviction and a lack of self- pity and if that’s true, you’ve courage in spades. That’s good. You’ll need it for whatever’s to come.”

He crosses the room and takes a seat at the edge of the armchair, passing one hand slowly across his face with a weary kind of forbearance.

“Tell you the truth, this is all fucking wild, actually. Long time ago, I was exactly where you are now. Had a friend once-my only real best friend-a vampire just like me. Thick as thieves we were from the first moment we said hello. Well, you know how it is when you find someone you really connect with. It’s refreshing, like finally being understood on an intrinsic level. Your whole perspective changes, even your perspective about yourself. I dunno, it’s different for everyone I suppose, but it was good what we had. Immortality isn’t kind and people less so, but being with him made things seem different. The world seemed less boring, less trite, less malicious and redundant. Together it felt like we could face innumerable centuries. Back then the nights were ours and I can truly say, no joke of a lie, I had the best years of my life at his side. Then…the Night Court came for him.”

Teague leaves off as another fissure of lightning illuminates the shapes of buildings and lampposts along the street chased by a volley of angry thunder.

“What happened to him,” Phil asks softly when the rumbles segue away into the rain.

Teague gives a gallant shrug, a rolling loping shudder of his shoulders that communicates more grief than it does nonchalance. “They took him and like you, I went after him to get him back. I knew what they’d say, how’d they try to convert him to their number. Even with how strong he was I didn’t underestimate their ability to put on a good show, enough to make crossing over to their side seem worth the trouble. I still believed in him, you know? That he’d put up a good resistance until I could find him. He was a rebel sort of spirit. Bit of a clever clogs really, but that was one of the things I liked about him. Didn’t take no for an answer if he could try something else and he wasn’t one to step in line to anyone’s pace if he didn’t agree with the politics or their attitude. Back then, the Night Court were more excessive and omnipresent than they are today and he wasn’t shy about letting them know how much he despised their methods, which just isn’t on for a newblood to do or a vampire of any age when you’re not a member of the Court, so of course that got their attention. They only really go after the interesting ones who they think are worth a damn to pay attention to because other than being narcissistic and power hungry, they’re afraid of anything that hints at sedition.” A rueful smile crosses Teague’s face.

“Thing with them is they’re not the sort of people to worry about world domination or the kind of apocalyptic sieges like you see in the movies. They excel in the kind of subtle effective control anyone with enough supremacy exacts over the less influential or affluent. Their philosophy is keep it small, keep it simple; demonstrate their authority in concentrated doses, cull the idiots who act out of turn and consolidate financial resources into keeping our anonymity intact and preserved. They organize everything just so, keepin’ tight quarters on every detail so they’re a necessary element, so that new bloods don’t terrorize the city and so that the world at large minds its own business where we’re concerned. The system works, so no one questions the manipulation and the mind games behind the scenes. It just became accepted tradition, the way England still burns its Guy effigies on Bonfire Night and people still line up for the Queen when she makes an appearance. It was just what the Night Court was. Better to risk playing along than voicing a contrary opinion and risking your life instead, ‘least that’s how most of us felt about it. But not him.”

Teague laughs. “Nah, he hated the status quo. Hated the way the Court could play dirty, instigate and destroy people’s lives for their own entertainment without question. He was a regular Poldark come to think of it-you know, from those novels? Not the brooding, grim parts, just where Poldark rebelled against societal norms and expectations to forge his own way in life. There's one line where he takes on a judge during an unfair conviction and risks contempt of court to openly accuse their laws as 'savage and interpreted without charity.' That's exactly how he felt about the Night Court. He wasn’t going to stay silent while being tread on. I mean who could really? There’s a breaking point somewhere, when you’ve had enough of intrigue at your own expense, of people trying to break you down into bad interpretations of something you never really were. There’s a point where if you don’t fight for who and what you are, people will redefine it for you even if you were alright with never being defined at all. That’s what the Court does. Play games with people’s lives to make the centuries less boring to endure, to draw out the satisfaction of a reaction just because they can. It’s all about names and prestige and supremacy with them and one day he had enough of it. That's when they came for him.”

Another graveled choke of thunder overtakes the room and Teague waits until it passes to speak again.

“In the end, when I got there-when I found him- they destroyed him. In front of me.”

He gives another shrug as if trying to dislodge the physical weight of the memory from his shoulders.  
He’d agreed to join them, you see. I’ll never know if he was just having them on to play the double agent and take them down from the inside or if he really meant it. I don’t think he did or I guess I don’t want to believe he did, but either way, whatever bargain they sold him, he was prepared to accept and make the commitment. When I showed up like a bad rescue party of one they wanted to test his resolve and they asked him to kill me. He said no and you don’t get to say no to the Court, so instead they killed him and made me watch.”

His voice quiets to a murmur, lips curled in a smile that’s too fixed and rigid on his face, reminding Phil of something more like a pained grimace.  
“I remember they laughed. They thought it was funny. Like the way a malicious kid might find torturing a small animal funny, but I remember the smell of the fire and I remember what it did it to him and there was nothing amusing about it at all. I barely escaped and that was only because-”

He pauses abruptly in a quick flash of afterthought and shakes his head.  
“Never mind that. I only wonder if I hadn’t gone, if I hadn’t shown my face there, if he’d still be alive. I’d have been okay with knowing he was at least okay and alive even if he decided to become one of them. Anything was better than watching what they did to him and not being able to stop it. They used me as a pawn against him and they’d do the same to you. So that’s why I had to ask you, that’s why I’m still asking you, if going after him is really better than letting him go.”

Phil pauses in silence, more in polite deference to Teague’s experience than true hesitation and when the moment passes he speaks with unwavering resolve.  
“I’m sorry for what happened to your friend. I’m sorry you had to go through what you went through, but I’ve not changed my mind. I’m not walking away. I mean to get him back and I will.”

“Right then.” Teague nods. “Best to leave off with the woolgathering and just start trying to find where they’ve taken him. I don’t think it’s a slight of hubris to say I’m one of the best info brokers in this city. Even if I don’t know where the Court is holed up, I at least know someone who could say for sure, if he’s game to talk.”

“I thought you said no one but another member of the court would know where they are.”

“Yeah, the guy I’m talking about- Jorin- used to be one of their number, but he left years ago. Centuries ago actually. Fell out of it in every sense of the word. Just got fed up with it all and walked away. He’s powerful enough and old enough that he had the luxury to do so. Now he comes and goes like a damned plover. Never actually know when you’ll be seeing him again until he decides he wants to make an appearance, but if he’s in a good mood then I know where to find him.”

“And if he’s not in a good mood?”

Teague waves off the suggestion. “Then I ask around until I do find him. Jorin’s a bit of a specter all on his own, so that when he does pop his head up people are always bound to talk about it. Especially a former member of the Night Court like him? That kind of intrigue and notoriety always attracts attention, like moths to a flame. Or butterflies to hurricanes. Pick your metaphor. Point is, if we follow the flow of conversation we’ll find Jorin and in turn we’ll find the Night Court. Might be a bit difficult getting him to talk though.”

“Why? Is he…dangerous?”

“You mean is he unapproachable? Nah. Just hard to tell what he’s ever on about now. You’ll see what I mean when you meet him. He may have abdicated his position long ago, but he still keeps tabs on the Court, likes to rant and rave at them, and they tolerate him, like a jester or a curiosity. He’s just as powerful as they are, mind. I think they’re afraid to confront him only to find out that however mad he is he’d still be able to run ‘em all through the ground. He could do a lot, help overturn everything that’s rotten with the Court and make it something better, but he’s too much of a cynic lost in his own thoughts to even bother. Sometimes I wonder if Shakespeare used him as a reference for Jaques. You know, from that play, As You Like It; That famous soliloquy about, all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players? I mean, probably not, but he was around when Shakespeare was alive and stranger things have happened. Anyway, given my experience, I can’t exactly fault him for not wanting to be involved with anything to do with the Court, but let’s just hope he’s willing to help us now.”

Phil doesn’t want to ask what might happen if this Jorin might be in less than a charitable mood. He’d rather err on the side of an optimistic outcome instead of mulling over plausible worst case scenarios, not when there were already enough to go around.

“Could I use your phone?” Teague nods his head at the mobile in Phil’s hand. “With the power out I can’t exactly use a landline and a text would be more direct anyway.”

“Of course.” Phil hands it over, the torch light bouncing erratically in the quick exchange. “What for exactly?”

“I’m calling in a favor. If we take a cab we’ll be spending half the night going the long way round to where we need to be and wasting our time for a higher fare. Not to mention in this storm there might not be any cabbies who’d willingly agree to drive us around to begin with. I know someone who’s a regular spitfire on the road- knows all the ins and outs to get us where we need to be quick as a blink. We don’t have time for anything less.”

“Will he be okay?” Phil blurts out the question in a garbled rush and tries again. “Dan I mean. Until we get to him, do you think, he’ll be alright?”

Teague looks up from the phone’s screen and says nothing for a time, leaving Phil with the impression he’s weighing his words with care before voicing them.  
“I can’t say what’ll happen to him, but I do know he’s strong. Ballsy anyway. But you already know that. If anything, they’ll test him to see how strong he really is, to know the extent of his resolve.”

“What will they do to him?”

“I don’t think the problem is so much what they might do, but what they might say. Give them enough time and they can convince a drowning man to buy a drink of water or persuade the UK to leave the EU.” He pauses and then reconsiders. “Alright, so maybe that last part’s an exaggeration, as if that would ever happen, but you know what I mean. They’re masters at deception and double talk. They could make even the most self-assured person doubt themselves. It’s how they managed to recruit and silence so many of us for years, not including my friend.”

“Dan wouldn’t agree to join them,” Phil says. “Not even just to play along.”

“Yeah. That’s what they all say, until they’re in the midst of the Court itself. They like to play up a person’s weaknesses, make them believe the worst of everything about themselves and gas light them into thinking they’re worthless without the Court’s intervention- that they’d be better off with all the riches and opportunities the Court can offer. We’re talking a Midas-like treasure hoard of luxuries. All that wealth and prestige- it’s like comparing living in Buckingham Palace to a pastoral bungalow in Shropshire. What makes the odds worse is the greatest weapon they’ll use against him is you.”

“Me?”

“They’ll already know he attacked Ashton for your sake, to protect you. They might not value emotional bonds, but they do understand how to manipulate them, especially when it’s a bond he’ll likely put up a resistance for. They won’t waste time making you sound like a liability. They’ll convince him out of all his latent weaknesses, you’re the worst. They’ll show him how much better off each of you would be without the other, all with the ploy of making him believe he’s alone so he has no other choice but to accept the Court and their terms. Think of it as extreme Stockholm syndrome. They make it harder for the victim to resist when everything you’ve ever wanted is laid out on a silver platter for the taking. All you have to do is pledge your allegiance, subject yourself to their scrutiny and every whim or debt is taken care of. They’ll know every word to say to sweeten the pot so it’ll seem counterintuitive not to accept the bargain.”

“Dan wouldn’t just blindly accept an offer like that, no matter how good it sounds. He’s not the type to be easily taken in by something until he’s had a chance to think it over in detail first.”

“Didn’t he sell an axe to a kid one time?”

Phil coughs. “That was a one-off.”

“Hey, if you’re sure about him, then you’re sure, you know him better than anyone else probably ever will, but he’s up against creatures who’ve had centuries to perfect the art of temptation and unless he plays the game just as sharp and relentless as they do, he’s as good as theirs forever.”

“I still don’t understand. I know they’re not thrilled he attacked Ashton, but he did it to protect me, not overthrow the Court. Why go through all this trouble to threaten him or convince him to join? It all seems a bit overkill, if I’m honest.”

“Overkill is their modus operandi,” Teague says. “If it was just a matter of any new blood attacking Ashton I don’t think the Court would’ve given a toss, but Yilmaz is Dan’s sire and that changes everything. Take that detail and couple it with him outright attacking a steward of the court and he’s made himself an active threat without meaning to. They’ll want to determine just how much of a threat he really is even if he says he’s not. More so, they’ll be curious to know why after all these years without turning a human, Yilmaz finally decided on him. It’s probably why they didn’t kill him on sight. He’s suddenly the number one person of interest, otherwise you and I would be having a much different conversation right now…or none at all if they’d come for you too.”

The unspoken implication hanging in the air suggests perhaps they still might if the Court decided taking Dan wasn’t enough to settle the score. Phil decides it’s not a pleasant thought he’d like to fixate on, less so when his skin still crawls at the memory of Ashton’s cold breath sliding over his neck, fangs a whisper distance away from delivering a bite more intentional and fatal than Dan’s.

“Can’t she help him? This Yilmaz vampire-” Phil stumbles over her name as he tries to change the subject quickly. “She made him-turned him, like you said-doesn’t she care that they have him now?”

Teague scoffs and turns his head away in disgust at the idea.

“She’s just as bad as they are. Like a bad parent with no sense of responsibility or affection. She’ll nudge things into motion, or in Dan’s case set it off with a brutal shove and then step back to see what happens. She’s always been the wild card where the Court is concerned, like an impartial force of nature that does as she wills, when she wills for no other reason apparently than her own amusement and because she enjoys playing the Court’s games right back in their faces. They’ve danced around each other for centuries. This guy I met once, vampire from the seventeenth century, told me the Court were the ones who influenced the likes of Guy Fawkes and his conspirators to assassinate King James, not because they were opposed to a Protestant monarch as well, but because the king was more scholarly and curious than his predecessors. He’d started to conduct research for a book called Daemonologie in which he’d made inquiries about witches and demons. You know the way it was back in those days, if your milk curdled or your neighbor farted sideways it had to be the devil’s work. King James just wanted to turn all the fire and brimstone rhetoric into a kind of literary treatise. It wouldn’t have made much difference to anyone, but through his investigations he unwittingly came too close in discovering the truth about our existence and that ruffled the Night Court more than they liked. This wasn’t some no name bloke writing a book-this was the [i]king[/i], someone who could influence the attitude of an entire nation. Spreading ideas that raised even a hint of suspicion about our existence would have set off a furor almost like what we had with those two knobs Farrant and Manchester mucking about in Highgate. The king couldn’t be allowed to continue his work, so of course, there was only one solution.”

“…Convince him to write a book on royal gardening instead?” Phil asks after Teague looks at him with meaningful silence, waiting for him to fill in the blanks.

“More like-” Teague draws a line across his throat with grim emphasis to illustrate the point.

“Oh. Right.”

“It wasn’t just for the sake of protecting our anonymity. That’d be too altruistic. For them, nothing equaled the height of gossip and entertainment more than the public spectacle of a king’s death, but regicide isn’t a small matter, even for the Court. Directly interfering with human affairs at the level of royalty would’ve risked exposure, but as master influencers it was easy to arrange a few exclusive high society parties, invite some of the king’s most capable enemies and whisper a few choice words of incentive into their ears, thus setting into motion the gunpowder plot. Like I told you before, crowds that applaud a coronation will line up with the same enthusiasm to watch a beheading or to orchestrate one. Yilmaz however got wind of it and wrote a letter tipping off a Lord about the plan, stopping it in its tracks. I don’t know if she had any sympathy for the king or if she just thought it might be interesting to see what would happen if the Court were discovered after all, but in the end the crown was too distracted to make further inquiries. For a king, I suppose things like witchcraft and vampires takes a backseat to knowing a few people hate you enough to go through the trouble of blowing you up along with the rest of parliament. But that’s how it’s always been with the Court and Yilmaz, a glorified game of cat and mouse to see who will win and who will lose. Now, they’ve grabbed the piece they think will gain them some extra entertainment and leverage for the next round.”

“Dan, you mean. They want to use him. For what?”

“Who knows? Sometimes it’s just enough for them to have a new toy to play with because they have nothing else better to do, not exactly because they have a greater rhyme or reason. Like I told Dan, it’s never like it is in movies or stories with a linear plot where everything happens with a purpose. With us, it’s messier, more brutal and less straight forward. Which is life itself, I suppose. You’re left with silver-tongued bureaucrats who’ve had an age to perfect what they do and no clear way out save your own wits and how well you can play the game before they checkmate you off the board.”

Phil glances over at Dan’s empty side of the sofa in reflective silence.  
“Dan’s smart. Resourceful. If I have courage in spades then so does he. Whatever game they mean to play, he won’t just let himself be used. He already has an entire plan for dealing with pushy charity people in town. Well…you know…” he quickly amends, “even if this is different than being accosted by volunteers for Oxfam or the Royal Society of Pandas.”

“Pretty sure that last one’s not a thing.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Teague crosses over to him and places a hand on his shoulder, leaning up slightly to compensate for their differences in height and once again Phil is struck by the cold weight of his hand; the strong current of power running through the muscles under the skin like a livewire full of destructive potential. Rather than a painful vice however, Teague’s hand squeezes his shoulder with gentle reassuring pressure.  
“We’ll get to him. Whatever happens, I’ll see to it we find him and try to get him out. You’re my friend. You both are. Whatever happens next, whatever happens after, I’m with you both ‘til the end.”

Saying thank you in the face of all the risks Teague has agreed to take on after having only known them both for a handful of hours, especially after his own harrowing ordeal with the court, seems too crude and simple in expressing every nuance of gratitude stuck in the back of Phil’s throat. After struggling to find an adequate turn of phrase and coming up short, he settles for a nod and hopes the weighted silence behind the gesture can speak for itself. The message is adequately relayed as Teague responds with a nod of his own before retiring back to the armchair with the phone, fingers working across the screen at a dizzying pace to rival even Dan’s quick-fire skills with a keyboard.  
As incoming messages flash across the screen in prompt reply, Phil looks up slowly towards the windows where the storm continues to ignite the sky behind the blinds in concurrent flashes of light and grinding thunder.

 _Wherever you are right now_ , he thinks, _please, Dan…be safe._

 

### ❧❧❧❧

Somewhere on a winding stretch of the A1, a black Rolls Royce cleaves its way past the rain as it speeds over the dark slickness of the road beneath its tires. Refracted images of the boiling sky and the streetlights overhead leave their reflection in splashes of color across its sleek hull as it careens down the roadway with hairpin precision.  
There are few drivers sharing the road now at the height of the storm and any stragglers in the car’s path quickly find themselves overtaken by the harsh glow of the Royce’s taillights. If the driver is aware of imminent threats like hydroplaning or swerving lanes due to the turbulent wind gusts rocking the car, they give no sign of caution except to keep steady acceleration on the gas with the clear incentive to outrun the storm before giving in to it. Outside, rain batters the hardtop with a force meant to bruise and inside the sound of water against metal echoes a hollow riot like a kettledrum. It’s a thunderous soundtrack building up the already tense atmosphere within the car to a point of frenetic suspense as Dan waits to see which might give way first, the roof or his frayed nerves.

For the past fifteen minutes he’s turned his face resolutely toward the window, trying his best to lose himself in the melting blur of the world outside. It’s a poor view all things considered. Whatever snippets of London appear between the runnels of water snaking down the glass is soon lost to a chaotic mess of high beams on full glare and muddy indistinguishable shapes flickering away into the darkness of the storm as the car darts along towards its unknown destination. The speed of its trajectory, the offbeat sound of thunder overhead and the rocking motions of the wind buffeting the doors make for a nauseating cocktail his senses can barely withstand. It’s been nearly over forty eight hours since his transformation, but the world beyond the flat is no less vivid with too many details for him to process at one time. Now, in a heightened state of alarm as he struggles to balance sensory overload with retaining his composure in the face of realizing he’s about to face an ancient court of vampires without any clue of what to say or how to escape, he finds himself approaching the tether point of a kind of limit-experience which threatens to break his resolve altogether.

The very idea of ‘keeping his cool’ sounds more like a philosophical quandary than an achievable frame of mind at this point, but he tries anyway, staring out the window with a singular intensity as if with enough exertion he could teleport himself into any of the buildings dotting the horizon, perhaps a quiet café, a near empty cinema, the void of deep space or anywhere else that wasn’t currently the backseat of a highballing luxury car owned by the gravely silent vampire seated next to him. The window by comparison is a small reprieve of a distraction considerably better than turning his head to confront the darkness of Eris’s stare.

The entire time since she’d slammed the car door shut behind her and nodded at the driver to signal their departure she’s done nothing but watch him with an impassive expression on her face. If he had only just clambered into the car on his own and encountered her in the backseat he might have mistaken her for an impeccably dressed automaton with hyper realistic features. It’s unsettling. She gives nothing away. Not a quirk of muscle or twitch of finger to betray the slightest tinge of an emotion. In the electric glow of lightning strikes and passing streetlamps her face shifts uneasily with the shadows, at once enigmatic and conniving, then jeering and dismissive as if she were reacting to a private conversation in her head where the general consensus on him hinged towards unfavorable. Dan isn’t sure if it might just be the exchange of light and darkness playing tricks with his mind or merely a show of glamour feeding off his dread and playing up his paranoia for effect, but he’s reminded of Yilmaz suddenly, her face and intentions obscured until the last crucial moment when it had been too late to do anything about it.

Even turned away from Eris he can still feel the line of her stare tickling at the back of his neck and when the car flits past a copse of trees, turning the windows opaque with darkness, he sees her face reflected in the glass like a mirror, assessing him with the same inscrutable smile. He has no idea how the driver, clearly a human by the smell of his blood and the sound of his heart, can operate comfortably under her influence or if maybe it was just his salary far outweighed any lingering discomfort or curiosity. Pay someone enough and even silence could be bought for a price. But, luxurious paycheck or not, he still can’t help imagining how unsettling it would be to drive her around with that constant mysterious stare burning into the back of his neck.

It’s strange how she’s able to invade his sense of personal comfort despite the considerable distance between them. At least on occasions when he’d catch Phil unabashedly staring at him, usually while seated side by side on a long transatlantic flight when the inflight movie had run the full course of entertainment and Dan had either nodded off to the lulling music in his headphones or become lost in thought observing the clouds swirling past the plane’s wing, Phil’s expression bordered more on quiet admiration or genial amusement. Even when he admitted to snapping a covert picture of how Dan looked in the moment it was only with the benign intention of memorializing it for them both to look back on later with a wry smile or fond nostalgia.  
Eris by comparison looks him over with the derisive air of every school bully minutely seeking out the slightest flaw in character or appearance to fasten on and ridicule. The flat glint of amusement in her eyes makes it clear whatever private joke she’s thinking about is entirely at his expense, but it’s the tense anxiety of waiting for her reaction to the punchline once she’s made up her mind about him which makes it worse.

He doesn’t need a refresher course on the extent of her power, not when his fingers still throb with the dull ache of her grip on his hand, tripping along his knuckles in a persistent reminder of her strength. The only thing which had stopped her from crumpling his hand like paper had been an archaic set of rules and the curiosity of an entire court who wanted to meet him in person. Yet, she’d made it clear from the start how easily she could destroy him on a whim with little effort and no remorse. He couldn’t be sure ancient decorum and curiosity alone might be enough to dissuade her against suddenly changing her mind, especially when she’d cheerfully admitted making discord was her calling, asserting her nature with a matter of fact tone and a simple brutal twist of his hand that had left him nearly bent in half, until between her threat of sabotage and the pain arcing up his arm he’d been forced to relent to her will. He wonders then, given her cavalier attitude towards inducing pain, what she might do to him next if she suddenly decided bringing him along for the ride was no longer worth the trouble.

_I don’t think she’ll outright kill me in the car, but why doesn’t she say anything? Why is she just looking at me like she’s waiting for something? Or waiting for me to do something? God, it’s worse than that party one time when everyone left the room and I was the only person in the audience for the jazz band to play to and the cellist wouldn’t stop staring and I had no idea why or what to do. I mean…granted, at least she wasn’t an elder vampire who nearly maimed me with a handshake and effectively took me hostage to stand trial in front of people who were alive before indoor plumbing became a thing._

He never considered silence to be anomalous in and of itself. There were times when he appreciated it more than idle chatter, usually while immersing himself in a movie’s plot or absorbing the finer nuances of a song he’d never heard before, to the point where he and Phil had reached a tacit agreement that when the door to his room was closed with the intent to sequester himself away in a new music session or to drift off on the soft strains of Einaudi or Rachmaninoff he was not to be disturbed save in the event of a dire emergency or impromptu snack. He indulged in selective introversion whenever the mood hit him and although he’d never characterize himself as a complete introvert he understood when other people were. He’d been around quiet people before, more notably one of his roommates in university, a girl who had kept mostly to herself, observing everyone and everything around her with the same detached impassive air as Eris. At the time he’d attributed it to a wary reluctance at casual socializing brought on by the anxiety of being a first year university student in a strange new environment surrounded by people she might not have been comfortable opening up to easily. It had seemed innocent enough at first, lending her an aura of enigmatic intrigue until one night at a party when plied by alcohol and the loud electronic warble of the bass tripping out from the speakers behind them, she’d rattled off a confessional tell all of her life’s history to him in the span of four hours. There might have been mention of yakuza, underground crime syndicates and how she’d perpetrated a murder in Japan, but most of the details had been warped and overshadowed by the subwoofer droning on in the background like a bomb raid. It had been enough though for Dan to quietly nod along to her story, clutching the drink in his hand with increasing pressure as she’d went on, all the while thinking perhaps it would have been better if she’d kept up appearances and not said anything after all.

After that experience Dan had thought it was never so much the silence that disturbed him, but all the things left unsaid behind it, all the unanswered questions, the unclear motives behind a person’s intent when there were no visible markers to suggest what he could expect. With Eris it’s the same. Her mask of a face gives nothing away and the longer she stares at him in protracted silence the more vulnerable he feels, like facing down an obscured monstrosity swimming just below the murky surface of an ocean too deep and vast for him to see with any clarity the present threat that might be circling his legs as he waded.

All at once he wishes for his phone, the one reliable failsafe in unwelcome social situations when the company was less than desirable and he couldn’t make his excuses to leave without risking offense so that playing a mobile game was a less obtrusive approach in avoiding human interaction; especially here where the company wasn’t human at all and he felt more inclined to inhabiting a black hole than anywhere in the vicinity of the car’s stifling interior and its dangerous passenger. His phone however is miles away in a flat where by now Phil and Teague would have realized what had happened.

_Phil…I can’t believe I told him I’d be right back. Like every bad lead in to a horror film where the person who says it never comes back at all. He’ll never let me answer the door alone now after this. If I ever make it back home to begin with that is._

The absence of his phone registers on a more intrinsic level as Phil comes to mind. It’s a crucial missing link to all communication and he suddenly appreciates what it must have been like for Phil to stare at a barrage of unanswered texts, not knowing what had happened or what he might find once he returned home. There’s a small comfort in knowing Phil wasn’t alone, that at least Teague was there to provide a voice of reason and sense of security in the middle of so much chaos, but with every nerve straining to be somewhere safe, to be home, not being able to communicate with the one person who embodied both makes the waiting game worse

[i]Even if I could talk to him what’s left to say that we don’t already know? I’m in a car being taken god knows where in the middle of a storm turned biblical with no way to opt out of the entire situation. I don’t want to be here, but I am and there’s no stopping whatever else comes after.[/i]

A gust of wind rocks the car, rattling the door in its frame as if someone were jostling the handle desperately trying to get in. The rain picks up momentum after another bellow of thunder, crashing down like hailstones and Dan is surprised the roof of the car doesn’t indent into tiny stalactites from the force. It’s impossible to make out anything beyond the condensation of the glass and the darkness of the storm outside as the car speeds along at a nauseating headlong pace that makes him mildly carsick to watch the scenery flash by in guttered splashes of light and shadow like a bad hallucination. Through it all, past the fogged over sheen of the glass, Eris continues to stare at him, mute and rapt.

_At least if I had my phone it’d be a better distraction than watching her watching me, even if it’s not like I’d be able to concentrate long enough for it to be helpful. What would I do anyway, play a long distance game of ‘I Spy’ with Phil via text or convince her to try out new Snapchat filters instead of staring at me?  
Actually…that last part sounds like a good alternative at this point._

Overlaid with the sounds of the storm outside, a darkly sinuous hip hop beat fills the negative space of silence in the car, a slinking industrial snarl and grind of an acousmatic rhythm, heightening the mood to a physical pressure Dan can feel winching its way around his temples like a vice. The lyrics swell over the bass with a breakneck poetic frenzy he’d find intriguing and hypnotic in any other circumstance, but he can’t concentrate on anything over the louder racket of the rain and the distracted state of his nerves as Eris persists in her examination. The MC rhapsodizes on in a thudding relentless tempo he can barely follow about a woman in stilettos, about leather and lace and the taste of oxidation, about knives sharpened and black clippers and steel and chrome-handled switchblades. The chorus surges in an electronic warble of the MC’s voice intonating the words body and blood in a dissonant refrain like a slinking threat that describes the way Eris looks, covert and dangerous with sharp nails like flick knives and red lips like iron oxide.

_I’d feel slightly better if I just knew what she was thinking or planning right now._

He closes his eyes and inhales, trying to gain a clue to her emotions as he’d done with Phil by tapping into the fine-tuned edge of his new sensory perceptions, but after a moment of sifting past the sulfuric reek of lightning in the air and the ubiquitous ‘new car smell’ rising from the leather seats, he picks up nothing else save for an acrid taste in the back of his throat like burnt rice he can’t decide if might just be the residual scent of her distaste for him or his own latent distrust of her. There’s also an underlying hint of floral sweetness lingering about her, a spiced tinge of attar and musk he might compare to a Guerlain perfume he’d sniffed once in passing at a fragrance counter or an exclusive Tom Ford blend, perhaps White Patchouli or Jonquille de Nuit, but here it’s too sour, overly ripe, magnified to an indolic putridity he can’t stand. She smells like too many flowers in a funeral parlour, a cloying swarm of waxen lilies, roses and orchids undergoing a decaying scission of aromatic compounds to become something less fragrant and more noxious.

She smells like death, he decides in a sudden bleak epiphany, death with a practiced demure smile of a poker face and Louboutin heels with red soles the color of hibiscus, the kind which might crowd a dark solarium in a flower shop after hours.

His shoulder wedges painfully against the side of the door in a bid to keep as much distance as possible between them and paws for the window’s switch, meaning to let in some air and chase away the pervasive odor of death, but the button gives an empty click under his finger, presumably locked under the driver’s control in the front seat. He’s sure the same goes for the door’s lock as well, not that he has any mind to try the handle with the intention of tucking and rolling out of a car doing well over eighty on the roadway, even if the idea sounds preferable to current circumstances.

_Great. So I just have to focus on not suffocating, not going completely out of my mind and not being horrifically murdered in the car before it gets to wherever it is we’re actually going. It’s like trying to deal with one grand trifecta of ‘fuck you.’_

He sets his shoulders and for a while longer endures her stare like the world’s most unsettling one sided first date until the frustration of silence and the discomfort of unwavering surveillance becomes greater than intimidation.

_Right-if she won’t speak, then I will. If there’s some added retribution to be had for speaking out of turn to one of the court’s own then they can just add it to their list of grievances. I can’t stand this anymore._

He turns his head to face her, spurred on by a rush of courage he can’t determine in the moment whether might just be the byproduct of pretense or the adrenaline of nerves, but he calls on both as he steels himself to meet the unblinking weight of her stare.

“You know,” he says after another tenuous pause, “the view isn’t going to change much no matter how long you keep looking at me.”

She gives a small shake of her head to readjust the mantle of hair flowing behind her back, but otherwise she remains unfazed by his decision to speak unaddressed, her smile the same inscrutable Noh mask on her face.

“Oh? That’s too bad,” she says. “Then I might be able to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Why she chose you.”

It’s clear she means Yilmaz so he says nothing. She crosses one leg over the other (‘thigh high fishnets and the garter,’ the MC proclaims from the speakers in unwitting accompaniment to her motions) and digs the spiked point of her heel into the back of the driver’s seat, dimpling and twisting the leather with ruthless pressure just shy at puncturing a hole.

“Yilmaz has her own designs. Always did. And I’ve never understood any of them. Did you know she’s the last original Lycian? You could ask her what it was like to be born to parents who built and worked on Kekova before the earthquake forced them to move, what felt like to live through the Byzantine Empire back when ancient Romans were modern and paved roads were all the fashion. All the little whelps like to tell stories about her- the equivalent of monster tales for monsters you could say. Yilmaz, the ancient ferine goddess of the wood. Savage, unknowable, and untamable. Well...if you believe the popular gossip anyway.” Eris smirks with a knowing sidelong glance.  
“Other vampires still fear her, no matter how old they are. Even us. No one can ever tell what her game is. Mostly she does whatever the hell she pleases, especially where it pleases her to piss us off, but still- that she chose to turn you of all people is curious.”

“Me of all people,” Dan says slowly.

“Well, who are you that she should turn an eye on you?” She gestures at him with a flippant wave of her hand. “Yilmaz, a vampire of the most fickle taste I’ve ever met, who can go centuries at a time before choosing someone to turn, finally selects you as her worthy candidate. Why?”

“I got a triple A score in DDR once. Maybe she just appreciates people with good coordination skills.”

“Or maybe just those with smart mouths.” There’s a pointed inflection to her tone that makes his next sarcastic reply wither off as he opens his mouth to say it.

“The footage from the security cameras only showed us so much. There was no audio and no cameras installed in the solarium, which leaves you as the only person who can fill in the gaps to explain what happened. So, tell me, what did Yilmaz say exactly when she decided to turn you?”

He thinks back to that night when he’d encountered Yilmaz for the first time, lured to the back of the flower shop by the soft enticing strains of a piano and its odd pianist. The details of the moments immediately following the attack remain murky, like a half formed fever dream, but he remembers the conversation preceding it. At the time, it had seemed innocent enough despite the abstract allusions to gods and figures from ancient mythology, until he’d returned and been confronted with the stark predatory horror of her face as she’d stalked him across the room, cornered him against the flowers and slid her fangs into his throat. It was only later he’d realized their talk was just a primer for the main event with Yilmaz gauging his responses and sizing up each one as a requisite for immortality. Eris wanted to know for what purpose, but if anything Dan thinks it’s a question he’d still like to know the answer to himself

“She never explained why,” he says. “I thought she worked in the shop and I only went looking for her about this plant I wanted to buy. She was playing the piano when I found her. I liked it and I told her so, then the conversation continued from there.”

“What about?”

“Music, my career, her past in the theatre-ordinary stuff. At least, I thought so at the time. When I came back to return a ring she’d dropped in my bag she…seemed to find it impressive or interesting. I don’t know. She only told me I was ‘worthy.’ If there’s some greater purpose behind her decision she never told me. It felt arbitrary. Like winning the lottery.” He pauses and on an afterthought in which he recalls the vivid hunger in her dark eyes and the fangs in her mouth he corrects himself. “A fucking terrifying lottery.”

“In which you received the sweet end of the deal. Eternity, uncontested strength and the ability to roam the shadows of any city unafraid-you can’t tell me you regret that?”

“From an abstract perspective…no.” Dan measures each word with care. “But it’s not abstract. I’m living the experience and if I regret anything it’s having that experience shoved on me without warning before I could decide if I wanted it or not. Everything is overwhelming-demanding. It would be one thing if I could ignore the responsibility, but I can’t. It doesn’t feel ascendant, it just feels dangerous, like I was forced to participate in something that I can’t walk away from if I decide I don’t want it anymore. Then there’s this-you.”

“And what about me?”

 _The way you smell like dying flowers for one or a bad accident at the perfume counter_ , he thinks, _not to mention your stare, your threat, your smile-everything._

He says nothing in the end and lets the silence insinuate his misgivings about her.

Eris laughs appreciably. “I’m hardly going to kill you, Daniel, otherwise I’d have done so as soon as you opened the door. I won’t harm you here either. Do you know how difficult it is to clean blood from Connolly leather?”

“Er…I don’t-”

“Extremely. Seeps into the grain and no amount of cleaners or detergents can get it out. I’ve tried.” She passes a hand over the armrest of her seat in a slow caress. “We usually have to replace the upholstery or the car entirely. It’s a hassle either way so I try to refrain from making a mess when I can. You’re more interesting to us alive, anyway. For now.”

Not reassured at all by her promise, Dan inches closer against the door away from her.

“So, Eris told you nothing, as usual with her. Which leaves me with still trying to understand you. What is it about you that attracted her attention to the point she’d give you her blood?”

She looks him over with an exacting, critical air and he feels a twinge of self-consciousness at sitting in the luxurious, pristine interior of a Rolls Royce wearing nothing but printed pajama bottoms and a loose t-shirt with his hair tousled in unkempt waves. It wasn’t as if he considered the situation would be improved much if he were dressed to the nines in a McQueen ensemble, but he’d at least feel less exposed and unprepared.

"Traditionally, many vampires have their pets, humans they select as their favorites to turn, usually because there’s something about them that’s attractive or alluring,” Eris continues. “You’re somewhat pretty, I’ll grant you that, but it’s nothing different than a thousand other magazine pin ups with the same cookie cutter looks that are easily replicated and quickly forgotten. However…I suppose…”

She reaches forward before he can blink and turns his head up and to the side with the red French tipped point of a nail, testing the soft give of his cheek and the hard line of his jaw as if looking over a piece of fruit at a stand to buy. Her touch moves to glide along his throat, shivering his skin with a trail of goose bumps. It’s a crawling sensation of revulsion and he struggles not to openly choke on the bile rising at the back of his mouth with an acidic aftertaste like copper. Phil’s touch before had never provoked a reaction that strong. Even the acute sting of his bite had been comfortable and singularly pleasant by comparison. Because it had been welcomed, Dan thinks, because Phil was someone familiar and safe where Eris by contrast was none of those things. Her nail quests across the thick vein of his jugular, a razor point edge away from slicing through to the blood beneath, before traveling up the side of his face against the corner of his mouth to press into his dimple, twisting and indenting with the same careless motion of her heel against the car seat’s leather.

“Any dimples of Venus to match?” Her tone is lightly mocking as her nail presses down with the imminent threat of piercing through his skin.

With her hand so close against his face, the reek of funeral flowers and death is overwhelming. It spikes up his nose into his brain with a shock as startling and unwelcome as a migraine. The button for the window gives another series of empty clicks under his elbow as he leans back against the control panel to escape the frigid strength and reek of Eris’s hand. The door creaks under the excessive pressure of his full body weight and he thinks if it were to pop open now, spilling him out onto the roadway at full speed to contract the world’s most serious case of road rash, he wouldn’t mind at all. Better to convalesce in a full body cast than endure another moment with that acrid floral stench filling the cabin of the car. She quirks her head, studying him with distant appraisal and as her fingers bear down around his face, clutching at his jaw with the manicured talons of her nails, that pungent smell watering the corners of his eyes until they’re red and stinging, his throat crawling with the unwanted imprint of her touch, all at once he’s had enough.

He twists his head away from her reach and grabs her wrist on a deflective impulse before he can register the motion, but when he looks down to follow the line of her gaze focused on his hand clamped down across her wrist the first immediate thought which occurs to him is, “ _oh, crap._ ”

Eris pauses and the world seems to pause along with her. He hardly registers the speed of the car now, as if time had slowed to a crawl and suspended them in the seconds between the pending moment of her reaction. The consistent thud of rain against the hardtop of the car dulls to hushed static and his once deadened pulse races to fill his ears with a stuttered rhythm.

He should let go, he wants to let go, but there’s a recoiled energy thrumming up her arm into his, a poised strength collecting itself to attack at the first slip of pressure that pings every instinctual alarm in his body warning him that letting go is the last thing he should do. Maybe she’d reconsidered the trouble of replacing Connolly leather after all, even if he’d only snatched her hand away in self-defense against unwanted physical contact. Not that he imagines arguing reasonable cause would do much good if the court’s general response to his fending off Ashton was any clue.

She’s the unblinking automaton again, silent and still, but this time her stare looks unequivocally murderous. He hears the music as it thrashes over his head with an unhinged clashing whirr and thud like a great machine churning out the chorus in a repetitive mantra, darkly suggestive and encouraging. “Kill somethin' girl, kill somethin' girl, kill somethin' girl.” The lyrics boil to the climax of the song, repeating the phrase over and over like a neon sign flashing over his head with incentive. As if in response, her perfume crests to become an oozing metallic stench like corrosion and ozone.

 _Or blood_ , Dan thinks. _It smells more like blood._

Then Eris moves with liquid speed and her hand twists viciously, thin bones working under his fingers like writhing snakes, lurching forward despite his efforts to hold her back. If she reaches his face Dan’s sure it won’t be with the intent to idly prod his cheek, but to perforate and tear. He tightens his grip, bearing down around her wrist and shoving it away as she pushes against him with a relentless kind of power he can feel straining the curve of his spine and the tense posture of his shoulders. It’s incredible and terrifying. The force she exerts is comparable only to statues, to stolid, inanimate objects or deterministic inevitabilities. He’s astonished he’s able to hold her off at all even with new stores of preternatural strength at his disposal. Her other hand strikes forward, palm flat and poised with the intent to rock his face backwards with a slap, but he grabs the wrist of that hand too with quick unthinking instinct before it can connect.

_She’d probably dislocate my neck if she smacked me with all that brunt force behind it. God, she’s strong. I can’t keep this up forever._

More than her strength, it’s how her skin radiates a numbing cold too painful to hold for very long, tingling through his fingers with a harsh ache like touching an iron pole in the middle of subzero temperatures without gloves on until he’s barely able to feel his hands anymore. When he adjusts his grip past the cold his knuckles crack like dried twigs and the ache coils into sparks of fire through every joint. Eris looms further towards him, but through a feat of monumental effort surprising to himself he manages to hold her back. A dense void pools behind her eyes like blood rushing in from a skull fracture to fill in the whites of the scleras and as he watches they turn black and dull as if she were nothing but a corpse with two stones pushed into her head and he wonders in a moment of wondering terror if this was what he truly looked like to other people, something cold and indomitable and horrifying. To see his murky reflection in the toaster had been jarring enough, but confronting the raw evidence of his nature’s true potential up close and personal makes the impact somehow greater.  
A gust of wind jolts the car and they bounce along with the turbulence like two participants in a drunken sit down waltz. She pushes and he pushes back, neither relenting, both locked in a tentative stalemate that wracks his upper body with tremors until Dan’s sure if this goes on for any longer his spine will break. He starts to imagine he can hear the pop and splinter of discs giving way like snapped ropes as her curved nails inch closer to his face like a bouquet of butcher knives, the perfumed stench of her coiling around him in a suffocating cloud as she looms closer and he dazedly thinks of Lady Macbeth, of the smell of blood on her hands and how no perfumes in Arabia could sweeten them if she tried.

_Although she’s really more like Carmilla than Lady Macbeth, but at this moment she’s closer to a Silent Hill Lurker monster about to skewer my face if I can’t hold her off._

She’s inches away from his eyes, blurring his vision with the lurid red of her polish, closer and closer still, her body surging with power and the reek of blood and flowers and death. The cold traces a path up his arms to his shoulders and he can feel his strength waning, giving way to allow the nightmare points of her nails enough leverage to close the last bare few inches between empty air and the wide circle of his irises, when Eris abruptly laughs and snatches her hands away without warning, nearly toppling him forward and onto her lap before he has a chance to recover.

Her smile blooms wide in a rictus grin to reveal her fangs, gruesomely large and wolfish in her mouth, and Dan realizes in an instant she had only been playing along the entire time to test the limits of his abilities. At any moment she could have subdued him effortlessly and clawed him to ribbons and the only thing stopping her from carrying through hadn’t been his strength, but her own intrigued amusement.

“Now that was fun,” she says, staring at the mottled circle of pressure around her wrist. “And interesting. Maybe you’re not just the simple pin up after all.”

He ignores the subtle dig and collapses against the door, rubbing the feeling back into his hands as Eris recedes into her seat. Her wafting perfume thankfully recedes along with her, but minute traces still remain and he presses his cheek to the cool surface of the window to breathe in the small scent of rain seeping through the molding around the glass, gulping it down like water.

“Yes, very interesting, but Yilmaz always did focus more on substance rather than looks.” Eris rubs her wrist in a thoughtful distracted way as Dan redoubles his efforts to urge a semblance of warmth back into his hands, aware they might never truly be warm again, especially not after having been exposed to the frostbitten chill of Eris’s skin.

“Even so, I still don’t understand,” she says. “What about you stood out so much that you’d be considered worthy? You’re no eminent scholar, no clever savant of notable musical or scientific talents. The only competent wisdom you apparently possess limits itself to scraps of armchair philosophy lifted from celebrity think pieces and summarized Wikipedia articles-in short, the layman’s school of mediocrity. What active skills you do have consist of speaking into a camera in your bedroom and hoping what you say is good enough to keep the world’s attention, but even then it amounts to filmed compilations on being an awkward antisocial mess of irredeemable flaws.”

He winces, thinking if she wanted to roast him it might have been kinder to shove him in a volcano and be done with it.

“Alright, calm down,” he mutters. “If you saw that other video on cringe attacks you’ll know I’m pretty good at having them without any help, but thanks for the motivational push.”

“Everything you do amounts to luck of the draw with some well-placed sex appeal and pandering for good measure. Where could Yilmaz see substance in all that? Yet, I suppose you’re due some credit for daring to presume you could pull it off in the first place. You’ve done well for yourself all things considered.”

She slips a phone from the pocket of her coat and with a mincing click of her nails begins to flip through articles on the screen, all of which he sees feature his name and picture as the lead headline.  
“It takes nerve to market yourself as a valuable commodity worth an audience’s time and investment, but you’ve already demonstrated nerve isn’t exactly something you lack. Clearly it’s paid off.” She waves the phone at him to indicate the slew of posts and websites taking up the screen. “You’re practically a household name. Everyone is talking about you now. What must that feel like for you I wonder?”

“Sometimes? A bit like this car ride,” he says dryly. “But then it depends on who’s talking and what’s the topic of conversation.”

She raises an eyebrow as she continues to scroll through posts, tweets and news articles on the screen. “It’s not just here they’re talking about you. Our entire community is abuzz. I was in Hakuba when the news came from Ashton, but even before he came whining to the Court I’d already heard whispers through the walls. Can you imagine? A far flung village in Japan, ice and snow for miles, and no matter where I turned all the featured gossip was about how Yilmaz had made a new blood, the first human she’d turned in years and when I go to see for myself it turns out to be…you.”

She drops the phone back into her pocket and clasps her hands over her knee, nails delicately arranged on top of each other as she leans forward to assess him once more.  
“So what is it? Why do they like you? Why did she turn you? Yilmaz likes people who aren’t boring, yet you seem plain enough to me, if somewhat abrasive and headstrong. But then, of course, you did stand up to Ashton even when he stood the chance of running your face through a wall and you dared to defend yourself against me when I could’ve taken your arm off at the shoulder, which makes you brave or an idiot and sometimes the two go hand in hand. So naturally, I’m curious which it is. We all are. What makes you so different and appealing?”

Dan closes his eyes. Apparently it didn’t make a difference whether it came from humans or vampires. The conversation was always the same. Having a self-employed career based on indulging his creative vision by his own merit always met the same snide challenge to prove his contributions were more viable than the demands of a standard office job or blue collar work. He could understand the financial aspect of the discussion. It was difficult to assume one could make a steady living off a job that required time and investment to bring in a paycheck enough to make ends meet. He’d dealt with the less glamorous aspects of chasing his dreams on a budget, at times wondering if maybe pursuing his university degree might not have been a better idea after all, but things had worked out. Through effort and persistence, things had turned out alright for them both. The lingering skepticism hardly bothered him anymore and if needled for a response by more outspoken critics he could hold up the list of his accomplishments to speak for themselves. It was only when people insinuated his vision, his efforts and personality were somehow lacking in anything worth a second look that he quickly became fed up with explanations. It was never so much that people would outright ask him to prove he was someone worthy of attention, it always whittled down to whether or not everything he did acceded to someone else’s standards for what they deemed to be entertaining, valuable and productive. Eris’s question amounted to the same. He could say it was enough he’d spent ample time and mental anguish trying to prove it to himself while trying to surround himself with friends and acquaintances who didn’t hold him to the standard of an arbitrary litmus test to see whether or not he was someone worthy of their time; who appreciated him at first glance for who he was, for all the things he wanted to be and not for how he could benefit them personally, but he’s too exhausted to belabor the point to a stranger with a predilection for the sadistic who might hardly give a damn.

In the end, he sighs and merely says, “your guess is as good as mine.”

“That’s it then.” She looks unimpressed. “No snappy counter argument to prove you’re more than capable, no anecdotes or secrets to divulge to prove how worthy and wonderful you are despite my first impressions?”

“You’ve already made up your mind about me, so why bother? It’s not like I have any groundbreaking secrets that would make a difference to sway your opinion.”

“Everyone has secrets. It’s just a matter of incentive to find out what they are.” Her stiletto grinds further into the leather of the seat. “With you for example there are rumors and gossip enough to fill a library. Most of them are exaggerated anecdotes or total fabrications, but as with drunks and children, somewhere in all the nonsense is a grain of truth.”

“Good luck figuring that out then. If you get really stumped you could ask Akinator to figure out the answer for you.”

Eris ignores him and continues speaking. “There are some stories which paint you as a vain, self-absorbed smart arse.”

“Posting a few pictures on Instagram doesn’t exactly make me Dorian Gray.”

“I’ve read other accounts that describe you as a secluded snob. Others that say you’re two-faced-”

“Occupational hazard of being a Gemini I guess.”

“-more which proclaim you as an exploiter, as a fraud, as untalented, arrogant, temperamental and unoriginal.”

“You should read some of my older Youtube comments if you want more diversity of opinions. They get more colorful as you go along.”

“Other remarks compare you to a rat, trash, common beans, some odd manner of frog-"

“Welcome to the lingo of the Internet, where affection is best conveyed through memes and ironic insults. You should try it some time.”

“Then we have the many questions about your relationships, your identity, your sexuality and why no one has a definitive answer to any of them.”

Dan pulls up short from another curt reply and frowns. Before it had been mildly amusing to thwart her laundry list of accusations, but now a deep seated itch of frustration begins to gnaw at his fangs. “Maybe because it’s enough for me alone to know the answer.”

“But that’s not good enough for me. You’re here because I want to know who’s the upstart whelp Yilmaz chose as her own, but there’s a great discrepancy between who you are and public perception, especially when you refuse to clarify when asked. I want a definitive response, not guessing games. You’re somewhat of a living myth now, something to be batted around and discussed, adding on to your story like a bad game of telephone where the details become more distorted with every re-telling. That’s not unusual for us of course. We’re the stuff of Bram Stoker’s imagination, bad Hammer films and a 90’s show set in California. No interpretation is ever the same. I’m sure you’ll agree now, the actual experience is nothing like fiction.”

 _That’s a serious understatement_ , Dan thinks.

“But this isn’t about us. You’re the boy of the hour and everyone wants to know, who is Dan Howell?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Who is Dan Howell? Who are you?”

“I’m a nearly seven hundred year old vampire from the Heian period, a member of the Night Court, and a seasoned practitioner of Kinbaku- which is a fancy way of saying people will pay good money for me to tie them up in aesthetically pleasing ways. Sometimes, when the mood takes me or when the Court is bored for sport, I’ll do it for free, but those clients usually end up paying with their life.” She shrugs. “But I understand- you were going for more of a rhetorical, existential angle.”

“I- er-yeah…” Dan clears his throat.

“So are you trying to say you don’t know who you are?”

“I’m trying to say identity is mutable. People want me to explain myself, clarify what and who I am at any given moment, but I don’t want to be held to the standard of a definition that might change over time and not describe me anymore. I know the people I can trust, I know the things I like, I know what makes me comfortable, what motivates me, what frustrates me- so in a roundabout way, I know who I am, even if I’m still struggling to understand and accommodate everything that’s happened recently. I also know I’m not the sum of my flaws and I’m not who I was years ago, regardless of what people say.”

“Whoever you were, flaws and all, still defines who you are now.”

“I’m aware of my faults and I answer for them when I need to, whether people know about it or not, but I learn and move on. If others can’t do the same, then it’s for them to sort out, not me.” He glances out the window and tries not to focus on Eris’s hazy reflection staring at him in the glass. “People change, for better or for worse. They become more of who they are or want to be, whatever that really is in the end. It’s for them to know and if they feel right about sharing their discovery with others, fine, but I’m not comfortable doing the same. I’m not going to reveal details I don’t want to or hand out a ‘mea culpa’ every time someone demands it of me, no matter how many angry posts and pissed off tweets are written about me or how many questions people continue to ask.”

“So you truly don’t care what other people have to say about you. You don’t care about proving their worst suppositions wrong, even if it's at the expense of your reputation.”

“I get a limited amount of time in any given day to devote my attention to a set number of things and if I focused on every comment flooding my inbox with accusations and badly informed opinions I’d never accomplish anything at all. Other people’s hang-ups about me are not my problem. If I can avoid it, I do.”

“I’d have thought in your line of work any press is good press. It at least means people give enough of a damn to talk about you in the first place.”

“Funny that. The way people only give a damn when they think you’re worth a damn.” He looks askance at her. “People like to talk and gossip. I can’t help that, but I’m not going to invite or indulge it either. Especially not when it tries to instigate a conversation I don’t want to have.”

“You should know by now, in your profession, nothing is ever off the table whether you invite it or not as you say.”

“Yeah, believe me, I’m aware in more ways than you know, but just because I’m used to it doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with it.”

“In that case, the next few hours are going to be decidedly uncomfortable.”

The deep seated itch in his fangs festers into a pulsing ache along his gums. He straightens up and clenches the armrest of the seat with a wrenching force that creaks the leather under his fingers. “Why does this even matter to you? When Teague spoke about the Court I thought I’d be taken to face some kind of parliamentary inquest, but it sounds more like I’m being sized up for an edition of The Sun.”

“Ah, Teague. He does get around doesn’t he? The clever info broker. Never knows when to stay out of other people’s business.” She purses her lips in a moue of disdain as if the very mention of him leaves a sour taste in her mouth. “It’s been a while since we last saw him and under nearly similar circumstances. Did he tell you he used to be part of the ‘abattoir hounds?’ That was the name we gave to those of us who stalked slaughterhouses instead of humans back in the old days. Filthy habit really, but we’ve seen worse dietary fads over the centuries. There’s some who stalk hospitals for patients on heparin in the belief the blood thinner makes the blood run faster and richer; there’s others who prefer alcoholics for the rush and even those who feed exclusively on vegans. They say it makes the blood taste sweeter, but I think they’re mistaking blood for something else.”  
She raises her eyebrows and Dan takes a moment to catch on to what she means, looking away quickly from the weight of her gaze.

“I suppose he told you a lot about us. About our so called ‘games.’ We’re not mindless in how we operate contrary to what Teague thinks, but then we did give him good reason to be biased. He chose his allies poorly and paid for it in the end. I’d have thought age had taught him better about respecting his elders, but apparently he’s only become more of a fool.”  
She picks a bobble off the hem of her coat and flicks it away with a purposeful gesture meant to also dismiss Teague as a topic of conversation.

“Eternity is a test of wills. Our ‘games’ are merely an extension of that. Some of us are cut out for the long haul of immortality and others are not. The Court exists as a way to determine between the two. Some, like Teague, are simple minded enough that we tolerate their existence. Others, the ravenous idiots who go mad with power, are done away with immediately; a sparse few however fall into a rare spectrum of ascendant qualities we find compelling enough to warrant a second look. These lucky few, who might prove to be powerful, cunning leaders in their own right, are offered a chance to be one of the Court’s own, to be properly guided into the full potential of their abilities. I’m not certain if you’re included in that group, but that’s what our meeting tonight will determine. I think once you get a proper taste of how we live, you’ll have a better understanding of exactly what we are. Once you see for yourself the kind of freedom the Court offers, you might even find yourself wanting to join.”

“If we’re going by first impressions, blackmail doesn’t make a compelling argument for freedom,” Dan says flatly.

“If it’ll make you feel better you can think of it more as…strategic negotiating. What exactly did you expect anyway- for me to invite you to play bridge over afternoon tea and ask ‘please’ for you to grace us with your presence when you broke our laws right under our noses after Ashton warned you off?” She laughs and the scent of floral death crests around her. “Diplomacy is nice in theory, but tedious in practice and I’ve never had patience for it even if it means I have to twist a few hands, figuratively or literally, to get what I need. It’s more interesting to get straight to the heart of the matter. Unlike you who enjoys playing the cipher as much as Yilmaz does, evading and dismissing questions at every turn.”

“Sorry. Like I said, I’m not much for questions when they’re prying or unnecessary. Maybe ask me what I think of the current state of politics, why cable wires are annoying, what my preferred albums for relaxing are-” The nasal blare of an ambulance’s siren cuts him off mid-sentence as it races past in the opposite direction, momentarily igniting the darkness in a neon haze of flashing blue lights before it’s lost to the storm. “Or you could not ask me anything at all and just guess the crime instead, but I’m not answering anything I don’t want to.”

“I can’t say the conversation will be in your favor once you’re in front of the court if you can’t even answer my questions here.”

“There’s many ways to have a conversation that aren’t trying to pick me apart for everything I don’t want someone else to know before I’m ready for them to.”

Eris scoffs and twists the stiletto point of her heel further into the leather with a vicious wrenching twist. “Oh, _please._ Any conversation between two people or a room full of them is a constant discussion about all the things someone doesn’t know about the other. The old ‘so, what do you do’ questions, all the inquiries about how you are, where have you been, where are you going, who are you fucking-everyone wants to know something about somebody else. Don’t play it as if you haven’t researched every bit of information about something you like to get the whole story and then some. Riffling through Instagram photos, social media accounts, old posts and blogs. You could take someone at face value as they are here and now without looking up their past history, but we all do it, we all ask questions, because nothing is as intriguing as all the things we don’t know.”

“It’s one thing to research an issue for an educated opinion and another to pry into someone’s life for the hell of it.”

“Now you’re splitting hairs. Nobody inherently trusts each other. People say one thing and mean something else. There are always gaps of knowledge between what we see and what’s actually going on. It’s in a person’s instinct to question, from the nature of reality to the condition and character of someone they’ve never met. Gossip is the everyman’s discourse. It’s only part of why you’re so successful-people care enough to talk and question, even if the majority of the discussion amounts to apophenic conjecture. You just don’t want to admit that you’re the eye of the storm. It’s a clever tactic honestly. As long as you keep up the game of silence and secrecy you’re guaranteed an audience, the same way anyone enjoys a puzzle waiting to be solved.”

“I’m not asking to be ‘solved’ and I’m not keeping up any kind of game. There’s a difference between dishonesty and discretion.”

“A very thin line of difference, one you’d still rather ignore than address. Funny. When you confronted Ashton I took you for someone with more brass than playing the escapist.”

“I told you, it’s not-”

“Your problem.” She rolls her eyes. “Yes, I heard you and the redundancy is growing boring, but it only proves my point when people say one thing and mean something else entirely. For example, although you say it isn’t your problem, I think it is. The smallest details get to you, especially if they have anything to do with a critique of your character. You can feign you don’t care, but you do. I’ve watched you this entire time and just as before, you can’t dissemble a single feeling before it passes across your face. Despite trying to convince yourself none of it matters the latent indignation says otherwise. It bothers you and why wouldn’t it, when your entire life story is a struggle between external validation and self-sufficiency.”

The cloud of aromatic death crests once again, roiling over Dan in an acrid wave like ammonia, as pungent and unwelcome as her circular logic that’s beginning to produce a churning headache behind his eyes. He massages the sides of his temples, straining for the barest whiff of the cold, rain-filtered draft around the window’s molding in a bid to clear his mind before deciding to launch himself through the glass and forget whatever consequences might follow.

Between her morbid perfume, the claustrophobic space of the car, the pounding rain outside the window and a circular logic that’s beginning to sound more convincing than he’d like, he’s ready to launch himself out the window and forget whatever consequences might come after.

“Whose life story isn’t the same struggle? What’s your point?”

“It’s clear it will never stop bothering you and they will never stop discussing your worth and your flaws in a way that will ever make you feel confident or competent enough to exist as you truly are. One stilted conversation with a person, the wrong comment or gesture in a moment in time, will forever preserve you in the eyes of another as a hopeless failure, an arrogant twat or a dismissive idiot. And it also bothers you to think that no matter what you do, you’ll always be perceived as nothing but a composite of other people’s ideas of who you might be rather than who you are. Transparency is an unattainable feat when dealing with the public. No admission however heartfelt or genuine is ever truly accepted at face value without some degree of mistrust or sneering ridicule. Still, even when they think they have the whole truth about who you really are, after they’ve exhausted every pertinent detail there is to know about your life, with time you’ll become anachronistic, irrelevant- a faded curiosity looked upon in passing as a remnant of nostalgia amongst your younger peers, who will in turn be seen as better contemporaries of the time, with you as the ill-worn veteran who needs to sling his hook and shove off. To turn a phrase.” She smiles primly, the points of her fangs hovering over the curve of her bottom lip like a viper.

“With us however, you can be only who and what you truly are without fear of recrimination or misinterpretation. Every whim can be accommodated, all without having to work through the milieu of public approval to sustain yourself. With us, all your flaws, strengths, secrets and weaknesses will be accepted in their entirety.”

“I only have to tell you what they are- give you an exposé on my life story. Not exactly a fair tradeoff.” Dan laughs and shakes his head.

“Isn’t it? If we’re investing our time and money in you, it only follows we should know who you are. No company accepts a merger without reviewing the risks and assets of their potential partners and humans are no less careful in reviewing the personalities of the friends they make. We, the Night Court that is, don’t readily accept just anyone into our number. As I’ve said, you have qualities we find…interesting, but it remains to be seen how that measures up to who you really are. In the end, a bit of revealing honesty is a small price to pay for what we can offer you.”

“Even if I was interested, I’ve read enough stories about ‘Faustian bargains’ to know the terms and conditions part of the deal usually ends up being the heaviest price of all.”

“Yes, you’d know all about that wouldn’t you? You’ve already struck your own double edged sword of a deal. Fame at the cost of your wellbeing, your sanity; with wondering if your life is just someone’s private wank material to be caricaturized and derided more and more as the years pass. The payoff doesn’t even guarantee your current life and career will always work out for you. You have a shelf life and it’s only a matter of time until it expires. You’ve done well to this point, but why pay those dues at all when now you can have so much more? When you can be so much more? Our price may seem heavy, but it’s not as crucial and overbearing.”

In another scenario she’d make a devastatingly good lawyer, he thinks. She combines pragmatism and sophistry with all the skill of a seasoned debater who understands exactly what to say and how with convincing effect, honing in on small details he’d already thought about years ago in the quiet solitude of his room when every secret fear he harbored about his life choices rose up to challenge him just as Eris does now. It’s difficult to admit, but the more he listens to her, the more her offer sounds tempting enough to take. Was it really such a bad tradeoff? All he had to do was speak, answer what she wanted to know, give them the truth they were looking for and he could trade every insecurity for something better-for a life where he could come into his own, to be powerful and uninhibited, to have every whim satisfied in an instant and every debt taken care of; To make connections with all the right people and never again have to struggle over if what he created or said was satisfactory enough to make an impression.

_Of course, sure. You go on and take the easy road. Take the path of least resistance and what then?_

The dryly cynical part of his subconscious intrudes on his idyllic daydream with a counter opinion.  
_What happens after when they have you right where they want you-when they know enough about you to corral you in further with all your worst fears? It’s an interrogation they want, not an interview and their interrogation has one specific purpose-to see how much of a threat you are, to see how weak and vulnerable or susceptible to suggestion you are so they can take full control. And what if you take the gamble anyway? What if you give up everything and throw in your lot with them like she says? How much do you really want to bet you’ll end up doubling your losses? They’re opportunistic, not charitable. You’ll never stop having to render accounts to them. For an eternity you’ll belong to them and only when you’re centuries old and they’re tired of you and you have nothing left to give, maybe then they might let you leave, but only after you’ve lost everything, after you’re so cold and dispassionate you’ve lost the will to care about anyone or anything ever again, including your own life. You want to be their puppet, go ahead and sign on the dotted line. Tell her everything she wants to know, but just remember, when the chips are down, don’t expect them to help pull your ass out of the fire and don’t expect them to give you the option to rescind and leave._

Yilmaz looks at him, silently waiting for a response and he isn’t fooled for a second by the neutral patient expression on her face, not when he can sense the sly cunning behind it, especially not when he remembers the clawed hands ready to ravage him if he’d given her half the chance. No, he’d rather stay as he was and figure himself out as he’d done since he first hit record on a camera rather than join her and find out later that the price of comfort and luxury came with an exorbitant interest rate at the expense of his sanity and independence.

“Have you ever considered,” he begins slowly, “just maybe in all the scenarios you’ve tried to impress on me about my dubious self-worth and the obvious setbacks with maintaining a public presence which I already know in particular detail, that there’s more to it than all that? Nothing is ever just a matter of black and white polarities where the negatives always outweigh the positives. I mean, I get it- the internet can be a dark place and people can be fickle assholes, but it’s more complex than you’re making it out to be.”

“Is it really or is that just what you want to believe?”

A bit of both, he thinks but doesn’t say it aloud.

“The internet is an aggregate of public opinion about as diverse and strange and conflicting as people generally are. I don’t expect to appeal to everyone all the time and I also don’t expect I’ll always be able to keep up with every new wave of conflicting interests and opinions. It’s difficult to find significance in a crowd of millions, all with their own ideas about who you are or what you should say and do and sure, sometimes…it can be too much. I’m a person after all, not a concept. I can’t just change myself around on a whim to suit someone else’s demands-so, yes, sometimes I wonder if the payoff for what I do is really worth it in the end.”

He looks away towards the window for a moment to consider his next thought before speaking it.  
“But then there’s people I meet in overwhelming numbers who have quite a lot to say about what it is they find so appealing or inspiring in what I do and that has to mean something. In a world where horrific shit happens every day, with whatever personal conflicts someone has to deal with just to survive, somehow all those ‘compilations on being an awkward antisocial mess of irredeemable flaws’ came to mean something positive, even if just as a form of cathartic distraction. That’s important to me. That’s what means the most. Not everything has to be an exercise in aggrandizing pseudo philosophical satire masquerading as high art in order to be considered a valid merit of skill or creativity or to have personal significance to the viewer. I don’t have to flaunt a master’s degree or Mensa grade credentials to prove what I do has credibility; to prove who I am as an individual has credibility either. I define my existence via my creative output, so every day that I spend finishing a project or working on a video, I’m living, I’m doing it, so I love it. Whatever else it is in the end, most of it, the part that matters, is good. That’s what I care about. All the rest is unavoidable, extraneous shit I can’t do anything about- all the rumors and gossip or criticism from strangers with a composite view of who I might be based on comments by people I don’t even talk to anymore or never knew at all except in passing-that’s never going to change, but that’s not all it’s about. You can call it whatever else you like, but I make peace with my job and myself the best way I can, on my own terms- flaws, strengths, weaknesses and all. There’s a select few people in my life who get to know all the good, bad and ugly parts I care to reveal to them and you’re not included.”

Eris studies him and Dan can almost see her sifting through his words in her mind, dissecting each sentence with clinical precision. “Ahh, I see. When you say ‘them’ you really mean _him_ , don’t you?”

“What-”

“The reason you’re in this mess to begin with, the reason you agreed to come with me. He’s the one person you’d reveal your life to and of course he is. You’d do anything for his sake; even risk your life to save his.”

As soon as he realizes she means Phil he doesn’t hesitate before saying, “some people are worth the risk.”

“Are they now?” She muses. “You know, I’ve always thought humans are like butterflies-vulnerable, fragile things. The life span of a human may be longer than a butterfly’s two weeks, but they might as well live for the same period of time as that’s the sum of their lives, a fleeting day by day progression into uncertainty and death. We on the other hand have centuries, eons-an eternity. I understand you probably find his company entertaining and quaint, someone enough to risk everything for as you say, but you’ll understand very soon that he’s a liability to you. He already is otherwise you wouldn’t be in this predicament right now.”

“Except Phil isn’t a liability. He’s a person. More importantly, he’s my friend.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all you need to know about it, yeah.” This time he meets the push of her stare with a shove of his own, refusing to back down from the skeptical lilt of the smirk on her face. He’s surprised he’s been able to retain his composure for this long, not with that cloying odor scraping through his brain and the tense crescendo of the music in the background thudding dully past the speakers like a tachycardic heartbeat to set him on edge.

“Now I’m more curious,” Eris says. “Such fierce devotion elevates him from something more than just a simple friend. Neighbors and postal workers can be friends, but would you risk the same for them or is your altruism single natured?”

Dan says nothing and carefully schools his face to remain a blank neutral mask.

“No, I think more than just a friend, he’s become a deeply entrenched addiction. It just makes me wonder if you saved him from Ashton only so you could deliver the bite yourself. You obviously covet him, which isn’t unusual. Love in any form is selfish. So I understand the motivation- the greed to want him in excess, to every degree; to know him and to protect him. It’s only human after all, but you’re no longer human. Maybe people are complex as you say, but the relationship between monsters and humans has always hinged on nothing but destruction. Our affections are never benign and where, as the old adage goes, you always hurt the ones you love, monsters simply devour them.”

“It’s not like that. I’m not like that. I’m not you,” he says, but as the words leave his mouth he remembers the taste of Phil’s blood, potent and warm and viciously satisfying and he wonders.

“Are you calling me a monster? Thank you.” The smile on her face looks sincere now, disarming even, as she takes his accusation like a glowing compliment instead. “But don’t be so quick to exonerate yourself from blame. There’s love and there’s hunger. Both inform the other, but one is avaricious and self-serving, based on nothing but savage instinct, just like the predator you are now. Or maybe it’s only heightened what was already there where you were just human. Either way, how would you ever know for certain to say which it is?”

There’s a ring of truth to what Eris says and Dan shifts in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable. He’d felt that same twist of overriding greed and hunger on the night Phil had first returned home, walking into his room wrapped in the high attar scent of soap and cologne and love and all such things which were good and quintessentially Phil, sweet and powerful enough to rival that of the slinking stench of death in the car. Of course there had been the other more alluring aroma of blood underneath it, blending together with everything Phil naturally was until Dan couldn’t distinguish the pull of raw hunger from that of benign affection. That same muddled confusion had followed him walking back with Phil from the near escape in the alley, then later in the lounge when Phil had reached forward with an inquisitive touch over his fangs and then again at the penultimate moment of disaster in the bedroom when on blind impulse his head had snapped forward and his fangs had bit through the surface of Phil’s skin, immediately flooding his mouth with a taste so profound and densely rich he’d almost been unable to stop.

 _And I wouldn’t have_ , he thinks, _if not for Phil spilling that glass of water, I wouldn’t have stopped._

Teague had commended him for not carrying through with his thirst, citing a subconscious strength which had surfaced to help him regain control at the last crucial second, but Dan thinks maybe Teague was wrong. Maybe it was just a fluke, a simple coincidence where Phil had gotten off easy. The savored heat flowing past his fangs, the hypnotic cant of Phil’s heart pulsing the blood faster, the taste so different from the butcher supplied blood which would now forever be a weak comparison to the true deal, had all been too addicting for him to seriously entertain the small voice of alarm that had urged him to stop, giving way instead to the greater impulse to feed. He thinks back to the night in the alley and remembers the spasmodic twist of rage and possession that had overwhelmed him on seeing Ashton with his fangs skimming across the surface of Phil’s throat.

_He’s mine._

The words had left his mouth in a tone like a promised threat, to ravage and destroy, and what if Eris was right, what if his affections were now so tightly wound up in his hunger that they had merged to become a dangerous kind of love which devoured until it was satiated, until there was nothing left?

Which is the part that wants him and the part that wants him?  
He revisits the same thought from before and even now, with the memory of Phil’s words and touch bright in his mind, reminding him that he was more than just his worst fears or inhibitions, he still can’t determine if in the end it was all just greed or love or hunger or the worst of every bad vice all at once.

_What makes a monster a monster? When does it reach the point of self-awareness where it knows what it’s become? That other vampire, Ashton, said we’re death with a human face and maybe that’s true, but when do I know when I’ve crossed the liminal boundary between humanity and cold instinct?_

Eris had asked who he was but whatever tenuous definition he’d been comfortable with before has rearranged itself into new shapes he’s not yet sure how to decipher. Enjoying Phil’s company and caring about his wellbeing were common markers for empathy, the defining traits of what it meant to love a person selflessly, but now he wonders, given his transformation and the new savage instincts accompanying it, were his motivations still entirely selfless or had they changed too? Wasn’t there a desperately envious part of him that wanted to ensure Phil wouldn’t leave, the same part which recoiled whenever a close friend suddenly forged a bond with a stranger sharing the same interests, as if he’d suddenly be ostracized and replaced with someone new even if that wasn’t the case? He’d felt the same vicious defensiveness in the past when trying to prevent others from encroaching on an ex-girlfriend, quickly stepping to with injured pride and a weighted glare to keep others at bay. In any other instance he could reason it was simply a reflex of the id, a natural, knee jerk reaction anyone might feel at the threat of having the people and things which brought them the most happiness or pleasure taken away, but he remembers how he’d looked at Phil and been overwhelmed with the impulse to reach forward and drain every drop of the blood racing under his throat in order to give him a new life filled with eternity and power where they could own the night side by side, together, forever. That hadn’t simply been an id response or base envy, Dan thinks, it was something else, something more atavistic and primal. It had felt good at the time, savagely right, to mark and claim Phil like any predator would do with what it determined to be theirs, the same way Phil’s bite on his throat had sparked through his nerves like a dose of adrenaline in a silent echo of the way Dan had said, ’he’s mine.’

Avaricious and self-serving, just as Eris had said.

Yet, even knowing the danger and his own vulnerability in the face of what Dan had become, Phil had actively chosen to stay, had even reiterated his decision after Dan had sunk his fangs into his arm, accepting the imminent risks the same way he’d accepted Dan years ago when he’d just been a viewer with a small dream, an unknown name and an aspiring hope to one day make a name for himself just as Phil had done. Maybe in the absence of a reliable self-perspective it was possible to find yourself again in the eyes of someone who trusted you implicitly, Dan thinks, someone who could draw out the best of your nature by embodying the best of everything you admired in theirs.

Past the demands of his new hunger and a power he still wasn’t sure how to control, Phil remained someone he would continue to risk everything for. With Phil there had never been any snide questions or skepticism, no demands to be something and someone he wasn’t to prove himself worthy of time and attention. He’d never felt weighted down by Phil’s presence as he does now with Eris. By contrast, Phil’s entire nature was lighthearted and enthusiastic, with an ability to elevate the most mundane occurrences into something exalted and fascinating. His humor defined itself by clever twists of mischievous wit devoid of intentional malice at anyone’s expense. Phil was someone without artifice, a person of rare unequaled caliber whom Dan had felt compelled to preserve and claim within the security of immortality, so that nothing could threaten him, not the obscurity of time or injury or death, but in a way they had already claimed each other from the start as friends and colleagues without the bite of fangs to physicalize its importance in an accord thicker and stronger than any bond of blood. It was there in the natural rapport of their conversations however casual and brief, in texted emojis and random quotes like secret messages only they could decode, in shared looks of silent amusement over coffee mugs, in the gentle brush of shoulders down the hall, in echoed shocks of laughter over something ridiculous and strange; in the annual ritual of sharpies on each other’s faces like an inscribed sigil to memorialize a moment in time when one meeting had gone on to create six incredible years of a lasting friendship which had been tested but never broken and would continue to stand the test of time regardless of the gift of immortality.

Maybe that’s the answer, Dan thinks. In all of Eris’s sneering line of inquiry, perhaps the only answer which mattered, the one answer he could honestly give without regret or second thoughts simply boiled down to the one person who had been there from the start, who remained constant and true; the same person who could help him balance the monstrosity of feral impulse with genuine empathy by virtue of his presence alone.

“Well? Which is it then,” Eris asks again. “Or do you see now there is no difference?”

“The difference is I had a choice and I respected his.” The answer is swift and decisive. “I don’t know if avarice informs something of our affections for other people, but it’s not the only thing that does. When I asked about turning him, about making him immortal too, he said no and I didn’t force the issue. I could have done it anyway. I could have killed him too. The urge was there and it always will be, but I didn’t. I won’t. For no other reason than because I chose not to, because I care about him and that includes caring about his choices too; because I want him to be a part of my life, because he wants to be a part of mine as well. You want to break it down to psychoanalyze more, be my guest, but my answer isn’t going to change.”

 _Choice_ , he thinks. _That will always be the difference- to choose to be something other than just base instinct; to be more than just a monster, to be more than what she thinks I am. To choose a life for myself that isn’t one they design for me, but one I make for myself. That’s freedom._

“Spoken with all the flawed sentimentalism of a budding addict who doesn’t know how badly ingrained their worst habit already is.” She smirks. “You speak about him as if you’re so sure of his intentions, but how can you say he wants to be a part of your life if he’s made it clear he’s in no rush to become one of us? He’s too enamored with being a human, with being perfectly mundane and predictable to ever entertain the idea seriously. It’s a wonder he didn’t abandon you from the first moment he discovered what you’d become, but I suppose you’re in the honeymoon stage now, where he’s heroically noble, willing to cater and compromise. But how long do you think he’ll keep up the act once he realizes he needs to measure every word and action with delineated care just to protect everything you are, once his entire life has to revolve around you- around your needs, your absence and your hunger? What human has time for a commitment of that magnitude?”

“You’re talking about someone who once fostered an entire family of hamsters and launched a phenomenon around a shrimp he hatched out of a bag of triops. I wouldn’t underestimate his capacity for commitment.”

“Are you trying to say you’re no better than his pet? That he regards you as a passing curiosity, a little freak show that’s interesting to observe until the demand of responsibility becomes too great to manage?”

“You can stop twisting my words back around at me, thank you.” He frowns. “It’s like talking to a personified version of autocorrect. An annoying one.”

“Why? Because it sounds too much like an uncomfortable truth?” The headlights of a car passing in the opposite lane of traffic momentarily flood the backseat with a flash of white, starkly illuminating the leer on her face. She’s enjoying this little game of back and forth between them, Dan realizes, always striving to have the last word in an ongoing duel he never agreed to where forfeiting the match by ignoring her or deflecting with dry humor is apparently out of the question. It had been difficult enough to thwart her attempts to gouge his eyes out, but it’s proving harder to divert her accusations when everything he says and doesn’t say lends her more incentive to garble his words and box him in with what she sees as critical fallacies in his arguments. He was capable of picking apart every action and thought in exhausting detail like his own censorious focus group without her to do the job for him, but she continues on with a smug look on her face that suggests this was a new game of endurance to see how far she could go before he gave in.

 _Just don’t listen to her_ , he thinks. _Don’t let her think she’s right and don’t let her convince you she is._

“In the end, it won’t matter how much you’ve trusted him with your confidence,” she goes on to say. “Once the initial spark of curiosity and intrigue dies he’ll grow tired and leave and you’ll be alone. Then we’ll see how much the risk mattered after all.”

“You don’t know Phil.”

“Neither do you,” she shoots back. “Everyone is a stranger to everyone else, no matter how long you’ve lived together for. Did you ever wonder why he said no to your offer? If he trusted you, why would he deny the offer of immortality?”

“Because neither of us knew what might happen if I tried without knowing what I was doing. It’s not like you can have a second go at not dying after the fact and I’d already saved his life once just to risk killing him again myself.”

“You never considered he might not want to take the risk at all? Here you are with more strength and power than he will ever have and you dangle the opportunity in front of his face and he denies you. Where does the logic of not wanting to risk killing him come into play if as a human, he could die at any moment when you’re not around to save him? His odds are better if you tried turning him, but he still said no. His priorities are clear then. He doesn’t want to be tethered to one person for an eternity. Even as a human, do you really think he wants to dedicate his every waking hour to carefully reassembling his life around yours? Forced to assume a responsibility he never asked for?”

“I didn’t force him to do anything. He had every chance to walk away, but he stayed.”

“For now anyway. You said it yourself, identity is mutable. People change. Why should he be any different?”

Dan quickly turns back towards the window, trying to hide the small tic of uncertainty before she can see it cross his face. “Because he is. Like I said before, it’s not my problem what you think about it.”

“There’s an entire world open to you now, full of new opportunities far afield from the same repetitive performance you film in the cramped four corners of your bedroom and you’re resigned to stay locked inside that room indefinitely, to fixate your entire existence on this one human and stay with him despite how he has no intentions of staying with you for the remainder of your eternal life. He stuck around for the novelty of the experience. Soon, he’ll prove he’s no different than anyone else who only wants to speak to you because your fame suddenly makes you interesting; something to be ogled at and capitalized on. Once he sees you’re more of a burden than the entertainment is worth he’ll grow bored and when he finds it difficult to live independent of your needs, he’ll grow to despise you. You’re in his way. Maybe you always have been, only now you’re able to realize it. You’re his failing, his weakness, just as he is yours.”

A gust of wind batters the car, slamming it with turbulence strong enough to snap Dan’s head forward and back against the window so violently his teeth clamp together around his tongue, immediately flooding his mouth with a hot burst of pain, but he barely feels it over the numbing surge of anger. He could tolerate all her snide opinions about his career and personality with a hard won patience forged over years of enduring worse commentaries than hers, but at her terse judgment of Phil as just another user, lumping him in with every stranger who lauded his name like a calling card for their own means to fame or idle amusement, he snaps. His head turns slowly to face her, nerves rankled and doubt forgotten as the dull itch of frustration flares into a molten heat through his jaw.

“What do you know about it? What do you know about either of us for you to say that?”

He smiles mirthlessly, mouth stretched far too wide to be truly mistaken for a smile at all, fangs bared to the gum line.  
“You can have whatever strong opinions you like, but don’t frame them as facts. Just because your philosophy revolves around misfortune and deception doesn’t mean other people are the same; it doesn’t mean Phil is either. You want an insightful, revealing anecdote as to who I am, fine. One of the reasons I started filming-why I continued with it through the worst of every pitfall and doubt-was because of him, because he gave me incentive and motivation. I don’t give a shit if you think that’s too ‘sentimental’ of an explanation, it’s true. When other people wouldn’t give me the time of day, he did. Before I was someone with a name anyone recognized or cared to know, he was my friend. Identity may be mutable, but integrity and compassion have always defined who he is. He’s the most genuine person I know, maybe the only genuine one; the type of person other people wish they were or wish they had in their lives. You said before I’d done well for myself and most of everything I’ve managed to do, all of it really, has been with him by my side. If he really is my weakness, he’s the best one I have.”

His tone is measured, but the force of the emotions behind his speech infuses each word with the sharp edge of an invective. Maybe it was possible to care too much, to invest too much personal responsibility towards another person’s wellbeing and leap to their defense to the exclusion of all else, but right now Dan feels only justified in directing every bit of reckless outraged energy towards Eris, speaking with a restraint only visible in the caved in leather of the armrest clenched under his hand. He can’t see his reflection in the window behind Eris’s head but from how her assured demeanor falters and her body subtly recoils away as he speaks, he’s sure the contorted rictus of his mouth must be unsettling to look at.

 _Good_ , he thinks, _let her be the one intimidated for a change. She’s only just met me, scrolled through a few tweets and websites for research and reduced us both, our entire history, down to a generalization of her negative opinion. I’m more than that. Even if sometimes I don’t believe that, I know I am; Phil reminds me I am. I’m not just going to sit here and let her state otherwise as if she has inside information I don’t after six years. I know who I am and I know who Phil is. No matter who doubts us, I know who we are._

Eris doesn’t take long to recover from the short lived surprise and elegantly rearranges herself back into the poise of enigmatic and demure, assuming a pert smile as if she hadn’t just looked terrified of him a moment before.

“Even more interesting,” she murmurs. “Yes, I see now. You’d turn back the very hands of time if you could to save him, wouldn’t you? All to be with him for more years than his mortality will allow and yet, with all that, he still told you no. What’s the point of your conviction if he won’t return the same?”

“It’s not about conviction, it’s about choice.”

“You’re too involved to see the other side of the coin. After all you’d done for him, all you’d revealed to him, he couldn’t sacrifice his fears for even a moment to share in this experience with you.”

“He’s not obligated to accept my offer if he’s not ready to. He’s not a mindless puppet on a stage for me to manipulate. Saving his life doesn’t mean I get to control what he should think or decide.”

“Not exactly living up to your self-imposed status as internet cult leader.”

“Yeah, see, it all ties back into that ironic humor bit I was trying to tell you about earlier. It’s not meant to be taken literally.” He rubs the side of his forehead, trying to smooth away the buzz of aggravation lurking under his skin while wondering if perhaps some calculated rebranding might not be a good idea to take advantage of in the future.

“Yet, you still have a convenient enough degree of influence so that it’s not entirely poetic license. You say a word and thousands leap at a chance to listen and respond. You create a video and thousands upon thousands more click to watch. That’s powerful and terrifying for you, isn’t it? To be at the mercy of an audience spanning the entire globe who will notice the slightest misstep. It must terrify you so much you fight to be in control of a situation at all times, to leave no room for error or carelessness, until everything falls into place just so.”

Dan stares at her warily, trying to understand the motivation behind her turn of logic this time.  
“If my name is going to be attached to something presented for an audience to see and appreciate, then yeah, of course I want it to be perfect or just as good as. What creative director who cares even a little about their work wouldn’t do the same?”

“But that’s not all it is. No creation exists in a vacuum separate from the artist and in so much as all artistic works reflects an artist’s vision it also reflects something of who they are- all their impulses and pet peeves. You for example, by your own admission, hate to lose control over anything you feel should be done in a certain way, but it doesn’t end with what you make. When you realized our little conversation was going to be more uncomfortable and private than you’d thought, you became annoyed. Suddenly your well conceived tactics for avoiding a discussion you don’t want to have all fell through. You have no control over this situation and you’d do anything to get it back. It’s the same way you feel at entertaining the possibility of a future where he’d leave and you wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop it. His decision is ultimately outside of your control and in a scenario where he’d only ever tell you no maybe then you’ll try your own version of ‘strategic negotiation’ to convince him to see your side of things.”

Dan laughs and even to himself it sounds bitterly contemptuous. “Well, that’s presumptive of you. And wrong."

“Is it? Then look me in the eye and tell me, if it came down to it, would you truly consider letting him go, to placidly sit by and watch him leave or would you fight for him to stay the same way you fought for him to live?”

The view zips by the window in rain streaked splotches of grey and Dan focuses on it without truly seeing it, refusing to answer.

Eris laughs and leans back into her seat. “Once again you’d rather avoid the issue than address it. I’m starting to think with you the silence says more than a straight answer ever would.”

He turns back to her, ire once again warming a path up his throat and around his jaw like a vice. “So you think silence is somehow an admission of guilt?”

“Well, it’s certainly not a denial is it? When you don’t give an explanation what else is there to assume?”

“That it’s none of your business.”

“That explanation might have worked when you were an unknown daydreamer from a backwater southern England town, but it’s different now. You’re in the public eye. Your business is your life and in so much as the world interacts with it, there will always be questions, demands and challenges that one day you’ll have to answer and tonight, with us, you will. You can only play the avoidance game for so long.”

He begins to say ‘just watch me’ between the grit of his fangs as the armrest under his clenched hand twists further into a snarl of leather and plastic when he notices a quick movement in the corner of his eye. He whirls to face her in case she might be lurching forward again with the intent of another up close and personal examination, but she merely reaches into the pocket of her coat to produce a thin lengthy cordoned rope, unfurling it with an elegant flourish neat as a magician’s hand trick. As he watches, she begins to deftly twist and stretch it between her fingers, kneading it back and forth as if she were crocheting without a hook. In moments she’s created an intricate latticework design spanning the distance across her palms like a spider’s web before she flicks a finger and twitches her thumb disintegrating the entire piece into a new one. She repeats the process, twisting, looping, creating and then destroying to do it all over again. It’s mesmerizing to watch, like a one person session of Cat’s Cradle, where new figures and shapes appear in the twist of the rope with preternatural speed.

“You work in film. After a fashion anyway. Maybe you’ll appreciate the visual metaphor better.” Her fingers work the rope into a diamond hatched symmetrical design and with every twist of her fingers she adds another layer of loops and lines through the piece like lace. “You could persist in saying nothing as you’ve chosen to do with me. You could decide not to address people or circumstances in the moment, but the longer you continue saying nothing, doing nothing, the more complex the web of intrigue grows.”  
The rope pulls taut as she extends her hands for him to see the finished piece, an impressive series of interlocking stellated designs.

“But if you addressed it, if you took the issue in hand-” She gestures for him to take the woven piece from her hands and he stares at her, not trusting her intentions for a moment.

“I’m not going to bite you, even if that’d be more entertaining than this convoluted example I’m trying to show you so you can understand. Just take it.” She shakes her hands out toward him again, palms still supporting the rope between her fingers and he reaches up tentatively, maintaining eye contact the entire time.

“Go on then. Watch what happens.”

 _To hell with it_ , he thinks and tries to take the intricate piece from her hands, but as he reaches for the ends of the rope looped around her fingers the connections promptly sag into broken tangles in his palms.

“You see? Taking it in hand breaks the web as if it never existed in the first place. It’s no different with anything else. All you have to do is speak up, address the issue and it will go away.”

“I seriously doubt saying anything at this point will give me a 'get out of having to see the Court and go back home worry free' card, but thanks for the tip,” Dan says in a sardonic tone.

“It would be easier if you just comply. It's all a simple matter really. You answer our questions and things will go much better for you. Now, if you decide doing nothing is a better alternative-” as she speaks she reaches forward in a blur of speed faster than he can follow or react to and begins to weave the coiled rope around his fingers. Loops fly up and around in her hands, intersecting and tying until he’s bound, wrist to wrist, palm to palm, in a manacle of intricate symmetrical knots tight against his skin. “Then, the problem engulfs you entirely until you’re bound and stuck with no easy way out.”

“Is…this…a play on the phrase, ‘with my hands tied?’” He stares at the ropes incredulously, not quite believing he’d just been the victim of a visual pun.

She smiles and settles back into her seat. “Hiding away from the things which make you uncomfortable will only work for so long and here it clearly hasn’t worked at all. I’d revise my methods if I were you.”

“Thanks, but I’m quite satisfied with my current approach actually.” He struggles with the knots over his hands, the ties pushing against his skin with curious pressure, but no matter how hard he pulls, the rope refuses to budge. Eris notices his efforts and merely looks on, eyebrows raised in amusement as she speaks.

“The court will ask you questions and for your sake I suggest you answer exactly what they ask of you. Tell them what they want to know. Don’t play at obscurity or I can promise it’ll go badly for you. We can help you, Daniel.” Her voice ebbs into a soothing croon. “The court is an opportunity for you to be more than who you think you are and we can help you understand your true potential if you’ll only listen and answer our questions succinctly. You tell stories for a living, think of this meeting as an extension of that. Your entire livelihood is on the line if you can’t sustain public interest. If you can’t sustain ours, it’s your very life on the line.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Dan tries to wiggle a finger free, but only succeeds in somehow pulling the knots tighter around his hands.

“That’s Kevlar rope you’re struggling with by the way, wound in a double column tie and a ringbolt hitch,” Eris says with an offhand look at her nails. “Anyone older than you by just a few years could break it just fine, but for a budding new blood it’s strong enough to hold you until we arrive. Normally I’d avoid knots in my work altogether. Kinbaku is more effective with ties anyway and Kevlar isn’t exactly my preferred material, but this isn’t a full body exhibition and you’re no normal human client.”

“I get the metaphor, wonderful visual aid, super effective. Now maybe you could just…you know, release me?” He twists his hands again with another wrenching pull that makes the rope creak in protest, but it holds strong.

“No, I like you that way, trussed up nicely so you don’t abuse the upholstery further and so we don’t have another repeat of before, even if it was impressive. It gives you something to do in the meantime since it’s obvious you don’t have anything else to say to me. Now you can sit there quietly and meditate on my advice; see if this doesn’t give you an incentive to reconsider a few things. But it better be quick. We don’t have that far to go.”

Dan grits his teeth and continues to strain against the knots cuffing his hands. “I’m not changing my mind.”

“We’ll see about that.” The scent of death like flowers rises in a powerful cloud and he turns away from it so fast he knocks his head against the window trying to seek out the small sip of the draft around the glass. “Very soon I think you’ll change your mind about many things.”

Directed by the minute flickering gesture of Eris’s hand the driver revs the engine with a low throttling hum and accelerates further into the heart of the storm.  
The music from the speakers heaves and churns into a new breathless beat and this time the lyrics slip into a cautionary tale about not being able to shake what you’ve done, no matter how far you outrun it. ‘Delusional is easier than self-examination,’ the MC goes on to say and in another situation far removed from this one Dan might agree, but now he wonders if maybe the difficulty wasn’t holding a light to your own perceived failures and doubts but falling under the ruthless examination of your peers instead, especially those with fang lined leering smiles and uncomfortable questions he didn’t want to answer. If her promise held true however he might be forced to answer regardless of what he wanted and under greater duress than just a series of knots tied around his hands.

The dangerous urgency in the air, once just a vague ball of fear lodged in his throat when the ride began, feels more tangible now that he’s had an introduction for what to expect from the rest of the Court when he meets them. Every second is tenuous and critical; every moment becomes another lost opportunity to understand what to do or say once he arrives. The music grinds on to warn, ‘get your shit together, lover boy, stop lookin' at the clock.’ But in this moment, time and how little of it was left is the only thing he can think about.

No time, no time- no time to get anything together, no time at all.

The car speeds on to its destination, bringing him further away from home, away from peace of mind and the safety of his own introspections, into the strange, unfamiliar world of the Night Court. He’s already tired of hearing the phrase, nearly as tired as he is of the entire situation and he thinks if given the chance he wouldn’t mind sleeping the rest of eternity away, preferably under cover of Phil’s particolored duvet back in a room in a comfortable London flat where he doesn’t have to stand trial for a crime he’d gladly commit again.

His cheek presses against the window and whatever dregs of body heat still clings to his skin slowly melts a porthole through the caul of condensation over the glass. He peers into it and watches the lightning flicker and flash over London, wondering if the storm might ever end. It doesn’t seem likely, just as the probability of walking away from this encounter unscathed seems unlikely too.

_But I’m here now and I can’t change that. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get out of this alive and getting them to leave me alone- to leave ‘us’ alone. Teague said they meant to play, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do the same._

The ropes dig into his hands but he barely feels it, numbed by the will to face down whatever might happen next when the car finally stopped. He looks out at the blurred pinpoint light of houses on a horizon lost between the darkness and the rain and finds a degree of comfort in knowing that Phil was safe, away from the reach of both vampires and the storm. Not that he could imagine Phil flagging down a taxi with the demand to drive out into gale force winds to bring him back home like a lanky version of Liam Neeson. He’s sure Teague might have dissuaded him from the idea already anyway.

 _Just be safe, Phil._ Dan sends the errant thought out into the storm, [i]and if I can, if I make it out of this, I’ll see you again soon. And if not…

Thunder drowns out the idea before it can finish and he presses his cheek back against the glass, closes his eyes and listens to the rain.

 

### ❧❧❧❧

“Sounds like it’s really pissing down out there.”

Teague peers behind the blinds as Phil sits at the edge of the sofa hovering over his mobile’s torch still pointed at the ceiling, his spine rigid with anxious stress. He’s not sure how much time has passed since Teague sent out a text for help, but with the storm intensifying by the minute, and still no sign of their promised ride it seems like too long. He’s resorted to counting off lightning flashes for distraction, categorizing each strike by their intensity and size as they light up the windows, but it only makes him more aware of the passage of time when thirty 'mid-range strikes' and fifteen 'supercharged Thor bolts' later no sign of their driver has arrived.

“I thought they’d be here by now.”

“I said they’re good, but not that good.” Teague looks back over his shoulder. “Storm’s like nothing I’ve seen before, not in London anyway. I’d be surprised if they _had_ shown up sooner-”

As he says it, the phone comes alive with the minute chime of an incoming text and they both stare at it incredulously. Then, in one headlong rush, they dive for the table at the same time, nearly colliding into each other. A confused panicked moment ensues as they try to take the phone and pass it to the other with the torchlight jostling between their hands and around the room in a dizzying strobe effect that hurts Phil’s eyes before Teague manages to push the phone securely into his hand.  
For a moment Phil considers reading the text, to prove to himself that it was their requested ride and not just a late night message sent from an unwitting friend or family member to dash his hopes, but nerves get the better of him and he quickly hands the phone over for Teague to see the screen instead.

“Speak of the devil. Looks like they’re better than just good.”

“Are they nearly here then?”

Teague pauses long enough to tap out a reply in an impossible blur of speed and then looks up at Phil with a smile. “Better than that. Our ride’s here and parked in front of the house. You ready?”

 _No_ , is Phil’s immediate thought. _Not if I had a year to prepare, I don’t think I’d ever be ready, but I’m going._

He takes a breath, mentally shoves aside all second thoughts and says, “let’s go.”

Teague wastes no time in exiting the lounge with Phil close behind shadowing his footsteps, phone in hand to illuminate the dark walls and corners of the flat as they head to the door, more for his own benefit than for Teague’s who he was sure could probably see past the darkness just fine without the need for any torch to light the way. As Teague bounds down the stairs, a small thought prompts Phil to hesitate just as he turns to lock the door behind them. The keys dangle limp in his hand and he can feel Teague stopped at the foot of the stairs looking up, waiting for him with stretched impatience, but he chances idling for a minute longer to peer back into the quiet shadows of the flat.  
It’s striking how even with the resonant chaos of the storm surging outside, the flat seems so deathly silent, so dark and empty. It’s strange.

Just a few days ago, things had proceeded along their normal routine of indulgent morning breakfasts in front of the TV with Dan looking over his phone while comfortably sinking between the worn cushions on the sofa without a care, a plate of syrup drenched waffles balanced on his lap as Phil had come to join him with two mugs of steaming coffee in hand for each of them. Vampires, epic storms and life or death missions hadn’t been a shadow of a thought in their minds. Everything had been safe and comprehensible, not muddled up in a string of near disasters and sudden changes, yet, despite the events of the past few days throwing Phil’s entire perspective of the world and himself into a new unprecedented light, the flat remains the same familiar refuge from greater cares where they could recoup in peace surrounded by all the color, pictures, décor, plants and memories which made this more than just a simple London flat, but instead a home. There’s no inch of space which hasn’t been infused with their personal touch. Even the small innocuous bundle of his socks in the corner of the hall and Dan’s suitcase taking up space alongside the shipping boxes filled with mail orders and fan gifts they hadn’t found time to unpack yet, find their mark as more than just clutter, but as signatures of their presence, of how much their influence over time had turned a simple collection of rooms into a living archive of their years together.  
This was their space, their own self-made private sanctuary and as he gives one more passing glance down the hall it occurs to Phil this might be the last time he’d ever see it again.

“We going or we going?” Teague calls up. His right hand nervously taps the corner of his sleeve where it bells over his fingers, clearly wound up and ready to spring through the door outside.

“Yeah. Yeah, sorry I was just-” Phil shakes his head and fumbles with the keys as he quickly pulls the door close. Better not to think about it. Better to just get on with what needed to be done without a second look back or else he might never leave. The tumblers of the locks slide into place with a smart click and snap of finality and with a brief silent vow to somehow find a way to return together with Dan, he pockets his keys, heads down the stairs and follows Teague outside to face the storm.

He carefully makes his way down the narrow passage of the darkened stairwell and in the meager spotlight of his phone’s torch finds Teague already at the door speaking to someone wearing an impossibly bright yellow rain slicker. With the lights out it’s the only spot of color in the grey washed shadows in the hall, shining like a warm beacon in the dark, defiantly bold against so much darkness. He figures the stranger for the driver Teague had contacted from the way they appear to speak animatedly to each other with the casual familiarity of people who had met before and he rushes towards the pair of them, anxious to be on his way, but when the person suddenly lifts their head to greet him and the hood falls away to reveal their face, he pulls up short so fast he nearly trips over his own feet into the opposite wall.

“Susan?”

The figure tilts their head inquisitively and steps off to the side to see him better over the bright glare of his phone’s torch and in the process reveals the familiar plaited coil of russet hair he remembers from the Pho shop.

“No way...”

The wide eyed expression on her face mirrors his shock, but she quickly surges forward past it with her hands outstretched as if to invite a friendly embrace, but on registering the rain pouring off her slicker in copious streams of water onto the floor she appears to think better of it and instead offers an outstretched hand to shake his in warm greeting.

“I don’t believe this-! Phil!”

He only has a second to register the trajectory of the handshake before her hand smacks into his palm without preamble, the blow cushioned slightly by the soft leather driving gloves she has on. “Never thought in a million years when I saw you again it’d be like this.”

“You two know each other?” Teague looks between them, mildly impressed. “Really is a small world.”

“We met earlier today for the first time when I stopped somewhere to eat,” Phil quickly explains, still recovering from Susan’s sudden unexpected reappearance and the ringing imprint of her handshake.

“Hang on-” a pertinent thought occurs to him. “You know Teague?”

Susan laughs as she steps back and readjusts her hood with a small shake. “That’s my question. Can’t say I’m too surprised. Teague knows practically everyone in London, doesn’t matter the borough. You need to find someone and he usually knows where they are or knows someone else who does. But when he texted me saying he had a friend who needed help, I never thought it’d be you.”

She clasps her hands together in front of her chest as if still barely able to believe the sight of him. “Wow. Shit. Just when I thought this night couldn’t get more interesting. Guess I can properly thank you for your advice earlier after all.”

“What advice?” Teague looks between them again.

“Just a wild idea I had about trying on a Youtube channel for myself.” She quickly waves it off as a cursory matter. “Something catering to the gearhead vagabond I usually am when I’m not working in the shop. I didn’t seriously consider it until our chat before.”

“You as a vlogger? That’s different,” Teague says.

“Yeah, well, I think I need something different, a change of scene would do me some good. It’s a gamble, but I’ve risked worse and did my time in the nick for it. This seems better by comparison. I’d just like to try and see where it goes. And speaking of going-where are you gents headed off to then?”

At Phil’s continued nonplussed expression Teague laughs and pats his arm in reassurance. “She’s our lift, the one I told you about before who knows all the least known shortcuts in and around the city. Met her back when she was something of a modern day Moll Flanders, neck deep in warrants but wickedly brilliant at finding her way around the police so it’d take months before anyone could catch up to her. I may know people, but she knows the layout of London better than even I do after all this time.”

Susan nods. “It’s a dubious skill I don’t exactly need any more, but it still comes in handy when a friend needs a favor. Just tell me where you have to be and I’ll make sure you get there, but if we don’t leave now we’ll need nothing short of a rowboat to get anywhere. I already heard Wallington’s starting to flood.”

“Right, we don’t have much time to stand around trading questions we can clarify later,” Teague says. “We’re going to Simpson’s Tavern. Not the Strand, the one on Cornhill.”  
“I know which place you’re talking about-the old relic from the eighteenth century nobody can find unless you ask someone where it is, right? The one half hidden away in the alley.”

“That’s it exactly and we need to be there five minutes ago.”

“Understood.” Susan steps aside and opens the door, immediately flooding the small entryway with the thunderous roar of falling rain.

 _Looks more like a waterfall than proper rain_ , Phil thinks bleakly as he pockets his phone and takes a step closer to the door with nervous reluctance at the thought of the cold downpour that would drench his head and spill down the back of his neck as soon as he stepped outside. Lightning fissures the sky and an ear ringing crack of thunder quickly follows startling him backwards. If he hadn’t already been intimidated by the sounds, the view alone is enough to unsettle him. The entire street is deserted, a veritable ghost town darkened by the blackout and overshadowed by the rain like an apocalyptic hellscape slowly threatening to submerge the entire world with the fury of the storm. In the midst of the darkness however, lighting up a portion of the street like twin suns, a pair of headlights on high beam shine as a defiant counterpoint to the shadows, just as bold and effulgent as Susan’s rain gear. Phil peers through the rain at them, squinting over the brightness to make out the rakish proportions of a brushed silver sports car he’s never seen before.

“That-what is that?”

Susan steps up beside him, hands on her hips, wearing a distantly proud expression. “A Mclaren F1. Your glorified chariot for the evening.”

Teague gives a low impressed whistle. “Didn’t expect you to call in the heavy artillery.”

“When you mentioned needing to be somewhere in a hurry, I thought this was the only car suitable for the job. Excellent throttle response and a V12 engine that practically sings when it gets going. If you need to outrun the clock, it’s the complete package.” She turns to Phil as he continues to stare past the head beams with reserved awe. “You’ve never been in something like this before?”

“Never,” he says, sure that he would remember riding in a vehicle with a design so reminiscent of the structured low slung body of a shark. “There was that one time at a charity event where I drove a child’s toy car in a speed run race, but I’m not sure that counts.”

“Oh yeah? How’d that go?”

“I made it across the finish line in seven seconds and somehow managed not to eject my lungs out of my mouth in the process, so pretty well all things considered. Though, I have the feeling that’s like comparing a paper plane to an X-wing fighter.”

“You’re well on the mark with that.” She laughs. “This car is speed defined. The only Achilles heel would be the brake rotors, but I’ve just replaced them on this one so it should be smooth sailing. Usually I’d take her out on clear open road, not the middle of stop and go London traffic, but I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem tonight.”

“And-er, when you say speed defined, how fast exactly do you mean?”

“Let’s just say she does 0-60 in about the time it takes to blink and the top clocked speed is 230 miles per hour. Not as fast as an Agera, but she handles better.”

“That’s…pretty fast,” Phil says, already motion sick at the idea.

“No joke. Driving in one of these, the word ‘discreet’ goes straight out the window. They’re outright fuzz magnets, especially when you’re nipping in and out of traffic at high velocity, but I’ve had enough experience to know how to avoid them and in this storm their highest priority won’t be looking for speeders. Even if they tried, you’re batting a thousand at catching someone in this, not when it outperforms a policing unit’s best 530d by a mile.”

“What did you say your job was again?” Phil glances at her and she laughs.

“Like I told you before, just a gearhead vagabond and a humble mechanic, only with a few well off customers that let me ‘borrow’ their toys every now and again.”

“Might think about sharing the wealth with your friends once in a while.” Teague cuts in with a playful nudge to her shoulder.

“If I saw you often enough to extend the offer I probably would, but I’m not sure you have a license to begin with.”

“Nah, not me.” Teague shakes his head. “Was never much for driving, I just like going along for the ride, which might say a lot for my philosophy on life really. That and a bad turn I had at driving down a balcony road one night in the middle of high fog put me off the idea of driving completely. Hate those routes, even as a passenger. They’re beautifully scenic, yet nightmare inducing all at the same time.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Sheer cliff faces dropping off into sharp rock beds and jagged forest canopies with nothing standing between you and a bad curve except a tiny stone ledge.”

As they continue discussing the dangers of narrow balcony roads suspended thousands of feet off treacherous mountainsides in vivid detail, Phil’s motion sickness begins to compound itself into a roiling twist of nausea in the pit of his stomach and he takes a deep shuddering breath to steady himself before ejecting more than just lungs out of his mouth.

“But no balcony roads tonight,” Susan continues. “Just a lot of empty roads about to turn into Venetian canals.”

“Yeah, high time we were leaving. Don’t suppose you have another set of rain macs in the car?” Teague shoots an envious expression at Susan’s rain slicker. “Maybe one not so bright green.”

Susan frowns. “What are you talking about? It’s yellow.”

‘’No, that’s definitely green.”

“Yel-low.” She shakes her sleeve under his nose and Teague counters with another protest of ‘green’ before Phil, in a haze of déjà vu, quickly interrupts their small feud.

“How about chartreuse and let’s go?”

“Works for me.” Teague shrugs and without further argument, before either Phil or Susan can react, he dashes out into the curtain of rain and makes a beeline for the car, kicking up small fountains of water from the pavement as he goes. He skids to a stop just before the right passenger door and neatly pops it open and Phil watches in wondering amazement as it slides up and out into the air like the doors on Doc Brown’s DeLorean, as if other than being fast the car might also be able to defy the constraints of time and space itself. At this rate, between the existence of vampires and an unprecedented hurricane force storm currently whipping through London, he wouldn’t be surprised. Teague clambers inside, climbing over into the left side of the cabin which Phil notices with wide eyed intrigue has no true backseat at all, only two passenger side seats placed on either side of the driver’s which takes a third unbelieving glance for him to realize is positioned squarely in the middle of the car rather than the traditional right side. Teague grabs for the seatbelt, clicks it in place and turns his head expectantly towards them with an impatient expression meant to ask what was taking them so long?

“I can’t tell whether he’s in a rush to leave or to just take the ride.” Susan shakes her head and makes as if to leave for the car, but glances back at Phil with a double take of concern when she notices the pinched look of worry on his face. “You alright? You look as if you’re about to be sick.”

“Yeah, I - just need a minute to process everything. I feel like I should have drafted a will before getting in.” He tries to laugh, passing it off as a joke, but his voice quavers to reveal his attempt at humor as just a cover for how apprehensive he truly feels. At the sound of the rain barreling against the houses along the street and the blinding white hot glare of the headlights on the car meant to ferry him into the worst of the storm, the enormity of the situation is finally starting to kick in. It was one thing to stand his ground in the lounge and declare his intent of bringing Dan home, but now faced with the physical magnitude of everything he would have to deal with once he stepped out the door, not the least of which included the darkness of the storm, the promised danger of what lay beyond and every unknown threat which might force him to confront the limits of his mortality along the way, it takes a monumental effort to not become paralyzed with indecision where he stands.

_Teague’s right. You don’t have a plan. You don’t know what you’re going to do. What can you do? After you leave there’s a good chance you won’t return at all, so what then? Are you truly ready to face whatever happens when you find Dan and it turns out maybe your first assumptions in thinking who you right now isn’t enough for you both to survive the worst of this? You told Teague you would try and maybe you will, but talk is cheap and action means nothing if you don’t even have the nerve to take the first step out this door._

Phil begins to think he appreciated his subconscious more when it stuck to offering random science facts or encouraged him with bad impulse control to buy miscellaneous items he didn’t really need instead of being so aggressively pessimistic.

Instead of warning him to hurry up or pull himself together, Susan gazes straight ahead and makes a point of watching the rain splash up quivering beads of water along puddles in the street, consciously making no effort to question Phil’s obvious anxiety for which he’s glad. After a moment, when another loud report of thunder dies off into the distance and his subconscious decides to offer a small truce from further discouragement, she finally breaks the silence.

“When Teague mentioned you were both headed for Simpson’s, I figured it wasn’t to stop in for a pint. It’s something more important than that isn’t it?”

Phil nods. “More like someone important. Someone I need to find before it’s too late.”

“Sounds serious. Not to mention, dangerous. I mean, if you’re willing to travel out in the middle of all this instead of waiting for it to pass. I wouldn’t blame you for feeling afraid.”

“Am I that obvious?” He smiles thinly.

“More like I’d be surprised if you weren’t afraid, but then again, maybe I’m just projecting and you aren’t.”

“No. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t, but that’s the thing,” he says. “It’s not really about feeling scared-more like I feel out of my depth, like I can’t do it, even if I want to, even if I’m still going to try-it feels like I can’t.”

“Like you can’t what?”

“Find him in time. Bring him back. Deal with whatever happens next if I can’t do either of those things.” He says it in a hushed undertone, not sure if he should be admitting this much to a stranger whom he’d only just met hours before, but talking settles his nerves better than bottling up the emotion and Susan listens along without critique to make him feel unselfconscious with the small confession.

“”I won’t go on about the whole ‘if you think you can’t, then you won’t,’ because you’ve probably heard it all by now,” she says. “But when you have nothing else to go on I find it helps to think of what you have to do and not how it might be done or if you’ll be able to accomplish it at all. As soon as you start to move, your mind usually finds a way to follow through. You get what I mean?”

“I think so. I already do something similar whenever I get sick, I just try to convince myself I’m not. It doesn’t help much when I have a migraine, but when I’m feeling poorly, say with a cold, it keeps me motivated enough to not completely shut down when I have things I need to do or want to enjoy.”

“Psyching out your body against the common cold. Huh. Never tried that myself. I usually suffer through in a ball of misery until it passes, but yeah, it all comes down to a kind of placebo effect. Motivating yourself enough to convince the rest of your body you can do more than you think you can. It’s not foolproof and it doesn’t mean you won’t still feel scared and unsure, but you won’t be tempted to give up as easily because of it. Besides, a part of you is already convinced you can do this otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here right now like two contestants about to participate in an extreme round of Total Wipeout.”

“I think I’d prefer that actually. Though, considering, my track record for losing my footing easily and crashing into bathroom doors, I’m not sure I’d make it very far.”

“Hey, Keith Richards crashed a car, fell out of a tree and slipped off a bookcase in his own house and he’s still going strong. Bless the man, to be honest. He’s like his own contained singularity.”

Another sizzling burst of lightning illuminates the street like a flash bulb so bright the forked white green afterimage imprints itself on Phil’s retinas like a ghostly reflection before slowly fading away. Thunder follows, angry and swift and in its wake the rain doubles in speed, roaring down over eaves and gutters with the force of a true cataract. It does little to help ease him along into the idea that finding Dan in all this would be possible, let alone bringing him back home, but he’s less keen on the idea of turning tail and retreating back up the stairs to wait out the storm in a silent, dark flat, wondering and waiting with his heart lodged further up his throat than it already was.

“I don’t know the particulars about what you’re up against,” Susan says over the crescendo of falling rain, “but I get the idea it’s not a stroll in the park. Still, you’re the one who convinced me to take a risk on a new idea, so you already understand that effort is everything. You know what it means to pursue something when it’s important to you-more so when it’s someone important. I think you’ll be more than capable of doing whatever needs to be done to get him back safe. And you’re not alone in this. We have your back.” She nods at the car to mean herself and Teague. “I can’t exactly do much beyond getting you where you need to be, so I guess in my case it’s a bit like Sam and Frodo. You know- I can’t carry it for you, but I can drive you.”

His anxiety abruptly gives way to a bubbling snort of laughter at the thought of Sam chauffeuring Frodo up the side of Mount Doom past Nazgûl and orcs in a tire squealing F1 like a strange alternate remake of the Fast and the Furious.

Susan responds with a laugh of her own and shrugs. “Bad metaphor maybe, but that’s where my strengths lie. Try not to worry too much about the ride itself. I know Teague said you’re pressed for time, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be careful. Being a thief may not have been one of the best decisions in my life, even if I did enjoy it at the time, but when it comes to driving I’m not a hotheaded idiot. I know my limits, especially when I have the responsibility of passengers riding with me. I’ll look after you two.” She places a hand on his arm in reassurance. “I give you my word on that.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs with appreciative warmth and thinks it funny but remarkable how a chance encounter with a stranger could sometimes lead to forging crucial and valuable friendships when you least expected it.

 _Not that I should really be surprised_ , he thinks as Dan comes to mind as the most meaningful example of how a stray conversation could go on to become an indelibly powerful connection.

He feels nearly ready to go now, but another thought occurs to him and he hesitates again.  
“You’re just doing this for us, driving us around in the middle of the storm. You’re not suspicious at all about why or what’s going on?”

Susan quickly looks down at her gloves and busies herself with tugging them snug around her fingers. “I’ve learned not to ask too many questions where Teague is concerned. With him, you just end up right back where you started and I figure if he was comfortable with me knowing he’d just tell me, so I leave it alone. People are entitled to their privacy after all. But it’s funny…” She looks up past the rain towards the car where Teague is sat, waiting patiently inside.

“My nan used to fix up motorcycles for a relative of his when she was my age. WWII vehicles- mostly Velocette’s. I have an old picture of them together, one of those dated ferrotype looking photographs amber with age around the edges, and the ‘relative’ looks just as Teague does now, same age; same face-even the same name. Then he’ll say things, talk about events that happened during the war or centuries before that in vivid detail like he was there, watching it all happen. And you know what….I think he was.” She smiles furtively.  
“If I were raised by anyone else I’d have thought it creepy, but my nan turned the creepy into commonplace. She was an old school believer in folk traditions and superstitions. You know, the kind who still nail iron horseshoes over the door for protection and have a keen eye about people after only having met them for a second and she always trusted Teague implicitly, even though she never explained why or ever admitted her Teague and the one I came to know were one and the same. She once told me he was the only person outside of family who ever knew her real name. And now, it’s the same with me.”

“Wait-” Phil stares at her. “Your real name isn’t Susan then?”

“Well, no. Not really.” Her expression looks somewhat embarrassed. “One of the superstitions my nan used to swear by was about meeting people for the first time and never giving them your real name-something about names having power and not giving them out to the wrong person who might use it against you. It’s not that I ever really believed her, but after I began stealing cars it became prudent to use aliases and fake ID’s to keep the police off my trail and I never stopped. Now I collect names the way some people collect stamps. I can’t keep track of them, so when someone says, ‘Rachel? Mina? Liz?’ I just smile and answer. I mean, what’s in a name, and all that, right?”

“So…what is your real name?”

Susan smiles apologetically and shrugs in a way to indicate not that she’s forgotten, but would rather not say. “Truth be told, I’ve gone so long without someone calling me by my actual name I prefer the pseudonyms to the real thing. I never suited it anyway. Teague is the only one who knows what it is, but he rarely calls me by that name either. Teague’s also the same person I told you about before who found me, helped me reconsider my life choices and never gave up on me, not even when I was at my worst. I figure if names really do have power, revealing it to him was a small price to pay for someone who essentially helped save my life.”

Phil’s not entirely sure he understands her line of reasoning, at the very least it would make ordering a drink at Starbucks a convoluted task of remembering which name to go by, but he can appreciate the sentiment behind it; to share secrets and personal vulnerabilities only with someone whom you could trust above all others to not turn those vulnerabilities against you. He’d done much the same for the past six years after all, sharing every inhibition and self-perceived flaws with one person whom he trusted enough to never intentionally ridicule him for it unless for their mutual amusement. Even when Dan had spoken out of turn in anger and fear, he’d rushed to correct the oversight before it was too late and in doing so had saved Phil’s life, later reiterating over and over in subtle actions and spoken words that his initial off the cuff remark in no way reflected how he truly felt.

Names had power, but so did secrets, so did small truths and whispered affections and so did the people you revealed them to. In that way, he and Dan both had the power to destroy one another, to exploit the other’s weaknesses with the wrong word spoken at just the right time to inflict more harm than Dan’s preternatural strength and fangs combined could ever do.

That’s trust, Phil thinks, to know all the ways to hurt a person and yet, to never act on them. Or maybe that’s just love.

“I suppose this is all just a roundabout way of saying I don’t think I’ll ever really understand Teague and I’m alright with that,” Susan continues. “I know he’s older than he looks and I know he’s not quite all he appears to be, but he’s good, whatever he is and when he needs my help, if I can, I help. I don’t worry too much about the rest. If I’ve learned anything it’s that the world is very strange, people stranger by far, but as someone recently told me, strangeness can be a good thing.”

A beat of silence follows again, this time suffused in warm understanding instead of hesitation and Phil thinks maybe he’s not half as afraid as he used to be. Dan might not be with him, but he wasn’t really alone and he finds a comforting strength in that thought, to know whatever happened next, however this night was meant to end, he at least had two people at his side who would help him see it through together.

The car horn suddenly interjects on the hopeful interlude, beeping out a stuttering melody Phil recognizes as the offbeat tune of ‘shave and a haircut’ and through the freshet of water falling over the open door he sees Teague leaning over the wheel with one free hand raised towards them in a questioning gesture of ‘what are you waiting for?’

_Nothing. I’m not waiting for a thing. Not anymore. Let’s go._

“I’ll have to go in ahead of you first,” Susan says quickly before he can dash off to the car. “It’s awkward enough to climb into a middle seat when it’s not raining, let alone when it is and I have to climb over a passenger while getting water everywhere. Soon as I’m in, you follow.”

With that, she fastens the hood tighter around her head and without another word races out to the car in a bright streak of yellow that quickly disappears inside the car as she takes up position behind the wheel and briskly waves for him to get in.

Phil steels himself and breathes. All the smells of ozone and rain and the brisk cold of the wind immediately surround him, mixing somewhere between his head and his chest to suffuse his spine with innervating energy. He thinks of cold winter days, clear and true, he thinks of the settled calm of undisturbed snowdrifts, of how it felt to breathe in that chilled air as a child, bright and eager to meet the potential of the world and all its promised adventures with the rare distilled courage of untested hopes and he tries to hold that feeling in his mind as he clenches his hands into fists and relaxes them slowly.

Be in your body, not in your head, he thinks and can’t remember where he’s heard that before. It seems like something Dan had once told him long ago before they were due to present a segment onstage at a convention, a sage turn of advice meant to emphasize action over getting lost in thought just as Susan had told him.

_Just act. Don’t think about it. Just go, just try and everything else will follow suit._

He hesitates only for a second before he exhales a shuddering breath and bursts out into the rain, dimly aware of the door slamming shut behind him from the violent force of the wind at his back. Another gust shoves him sideways, pummeling him with rain and nearly knocking his feet out from under him, but he pushes through it blindly, hunching his back like a linebacker hell-bent on a tackle. He reaches the car and all but throws himself onto the seat as another vicious blast of wind heaves him forward.

“Alright?” Susan looks over and, out of breath to speak, he can only nod while thinking he felt less alright and more like a sodden lump pushed together in a vaguely humanoid shape that with luck might one day reassemble itself back into someone called Phil Lester.

“Grab the door and pull it down to close it, although the wind will probably do half the job for you.”

He leans over to pull the door as directed and despite Susan’s warning is startled when his careful downward momentum is overtaken by the wind as it throws the door shut with an impact strong enough to rock the car. As he settles back, Susan inserts the key into the ignition and the engine comes alive with a guttural thrum louder than the crashing riot of thunder outside. Phil’s not sure what she means by the engine singing when it gets going, if on start up it sounds more like a dragon sneezing. On his side of the car Teague seems wholly unconcerned and instead looks around with a visible look of wonder. Susan fastens into her seat and sets the wipers to pace across the windshield at the fastest rate of speed they’ll go, but in the millisecond of time between swipes as they cross from left to right, the glass fills with a blurred rush of water to match the blinding screen of rain over the window at Phil’s side and he idly wonders if this is what it might be like for a fish to peer out at the world through an aquarium.

_If a fish were swimming in an aquarium with rain smacking against the tank like gravel being hurled out of a Gatling gun._

“Now that we’re about as snug as people who just stepped out into the middle of a bloody hurricane,” Susan says, “everyone get comfortable, put on your seatbelts and hold on to your butts.”

Phil quickly fumbles for the buckle and as soon as he manages to click it in place, Susan revs the engine, throws the car into gear and pulls away from the curb with an accompanying roar of the exhaust.

_Oh shi-_

Immediately, Phil thinks it’s like being in a plane on liftoff and having the force of acceleration pin him against the seat with a sudden backrush of pressure. The darkened street whips by the window and rain streaks across the glass in diagonal stripes pushed sideways by the force of the wind and the speed of the car. It’s enough for him to believe he actually is inside the DeLorean and they’re merely building up enough momentum to warp forward into the 40th century where he might be able to swipe an antidote for the travel sickness currently folding his stomach in on itself like a bad origami sculpture.  
Teague on the other hand presses his face towards the window and seems lost for anything else better to say than, “incredible-! This is incredible!”

To an immortal who didn’t have to worry about sustaining mortal injuries from a high speed collision maybe it was incredible, but despite his love of rollercoasters and his confidence in Susan’s abilities, Phil’s not entirely sold on Teague’s rave review. He’s sure the experience wouldn’t be wasted on Dan who might better appreciate the dynamic power of a car Lewis Hamilton himself drove, but when he tries to look at the experience from Dan’s point of view in an effort to cajole his nerves to calm, the engine accelerates to a buzzing droning riot in his head and the scenery outside his window becomes a nightmarish fever dream of speed distorted shadows until the only thing he can focus on is not being the passenger who ruined the upholstery by losing their lunch in the footwell.

“Can I…” he trails off when Susan downshifts to take a wide turn and large fans of water spread out from the tires on either side of the car like a log flume before she shifts back to high gear with another shove of pressure to pin him back to the seat, prompting his stomach to roll and pitch so violently it leaves an acrid taste of bile in the back of his throat.  
He swallows hard, closes his eyes and finally manages to ask, “could I crack the window open a bit? I- think I need some air.”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, of course. Go ahead.”

As soon as the window rolls down he abruptly sticks his hand out into the downpour and the feel of the wind over the back of his fingers like a soothing ice pack makes him feel slightly better. He’s not sure who had first recommended sticking his hand out the window of a car in the event of motion sickness or just how sound the science behind such an unorthodox treatment was. Maybe it was just another case of a self-induced placebo effect, tricking the mind into telling the body you weren’t nearly as sick as you thought you were, but right now the only thing which matters to Phil is that it works and he takes the small relief for what it is.

Block after block they speed by remains void of cars or people. They have the streets to themselves, exactly as Susan had suggested might happen. It’s convenient, but also sobering to see bustling London thoroughfares effectively shut down and abandoned as if the city truly were on the brink of an apocalypse where everyone had already evacuated en masse except for them. Everything remains dark and unsettled with every window of every house steeped in thick shadows like the prelude to a horror film, until they round a corner to find the block ahead lined with the welcoming glow of illuminated signs and streetlamps, small markers of inhabited life unaffected by the blackout they’d left behind. However, when Phil attempts to fight past the queasy reeling of his stomach for a closer look at the storefronts zipping past the window, he finds many of them are closed or empty despite the hour not being too late into the evening. It brings another unsettling thought to mind: what if when they arrived at the pub it was closed or what if Jorin wasn’t there and they couldn’t readily find anyone else in the storm who could say where to find him? He thinks about voicing this concern to Teague, but hesitates at the last second, caught up in his own uneasy superstition about not speaking of possible misfortune in case mentioning it somehow helped to bring it about. No, better not to dwell on it. He was already on edge; he didn’t need a further excuse to make it worse.

Be in your body, not in your head, he remembers, but it’s difficult to do when the view careens past the window in dizzying reflections physically painful to look at, making both his body and his mind uncomfortable places to inhabit. He glances over at Susan managing the wheel with a focused but relaxed air as if driving through blinding hazardous conditions was nothing new to her and then looks over at Teague visibly enjoying the harrowing trip with undisguised fascination. It wasn’t as if they both were unaware of the high stakes involved, but what else could be done in the meantime except focusing on arriving at the pub in one piece and handling whatever happened after one moment at a time?

_Just focus on getting there. Think of something else. Something better. Think of all the coconut drizzled sweets and sugary popcorn I’ll devour in front of a Food Wars marathon we’ll both catch up on once we make it out of this alive or think of a relaxing holiday somewhere far away from doomsday rain storms and cars that could possibly break the sound barrier if they went a bit faster. Just try not to worry. Relax._

The car revs with a baritone pitched snarl as the traffic light overhead turns green and his stomach twists violently, instantly destroying any budding cravings he previously had of enjoying coconut macaroons as he snatches his hand back out from the open window in a self-preservation reflex to grip the armrests for dear life.

_Right. Maybe I’ll focus on relaxing [em]after[/em] I’m out of the car…_

They continue to plunge through the rain, only slowing long enough to entertain the demands of a stop sign or a red light, but once Susan verifies the absence of cruisers, pedestrians or oncoming traffic she takes off again in a fanfare of cresting waves of water from the tires. Some of it splashes over the door and onto his face and he quickly closes the window to keep the interior of the car from becoming a traveling pool once he notices the entire side of the door soaked through to the floor mat.

He’s beginning to settle into the droning rhythm of the engine and the pebbling intensity of the rain hitting the windows when the car slows to an abrupt stop as they turn off from Gresham onto Cornhill. It doesn’t take long to note the reason why when Phil peers ahead to see the road blocked off by a promenade of ambulances and police cars lit up in a sea of flashing blue lights. On not finding any obvious gaps to allow traffic to pass, Susan clenches the wheel and slumps back with a resigned sigh of, ‘fuck.’

“They can’t have blocked off the entire road.” Teague leans forward in his seat for a better look.

“Doesn’t matter. The way through is. The next most direct route would be off of Lombard and I usually avoid it like the plague when I can, but it might not give us so much trouble tonight.”

“What’s so bad about it,” Phil asks as she quickly shifts and maneuvers the wheel to make a sharp U-turn.

“That particular section is bottleneck traffic all day, every day. Take a narrow one way street in the middle of a busy financial and commercial district, add an influx of drivers rushing to get wherever, multiply that by a fleet of trucks making deliveries, some of which like to double park and block the entire road like they own it, and you get the epitome of the worst of London traffic.” She shakes her head. “Then again, what’s new, considering the two most common complaints about living in London are always traffic and weather.”

“That and the Court,” Teague mutters under his breath.

“What did you say?” Susan frowns and glances over at him, but Teague waves her off politely and when she looks to Phil instead for an explanation he gives a noncommittal shrug in reply.

The car rushes off in the opposite direction without further interruption and they turn onto the thankfully empty narrow passageway of Lombard street. Buildings crowd in on either side to make an intimidating canyon of stone and concrete through which the wind howls and whistles, amplified by the buildings acting as a makeshift wind tunnel. There’s no trace of the aforementioned bumper to bumper traffic except for a lone parked car and an abandoned bicycle laying upside down at an angle against a bollard, its back wheel spinning furiously in the wind as if its owner had ditched it in too much of a panic to care about bringing it along with them.

“This is your stop then.”  
Susan coasts along to a crawl and parks across from a small alleyway much narrower and darker than Lombard Street itself. The only light comes from a lone streetlamp with a fettered glow too weak to illuminate the rest of the path down towards where the tavern presumably was, but Phil takes its presence as a hopeful sign regardless.

_It means there’s no blackout here. The tavern could still be open. There’s that at least._

Teague swiftly pops the buckle on his belt and seems ready to rush back out into the rain, but pauses at the last second with his hand on the door handle. “We shouldn’t be too long. Just need to ask someone for directions and we’re out.”

“Fine. Do your thing.” Susan waves him on. “I’ll stay here-keep the car ready and running for when you two get back.”

“Makes it sound like you’re our getaway driver,” Phil says.

“She just might be, depending on how Jorin takes our request.”

“What do you mean-like he’ll ‘hulk out’ or something?” He means it in a lighthearted way, but Teague stares at him with an expressly worried look on his face to suggest it was a distinct possibility.

“I thought you said he wasn’t dangerous?”

“He isn’t. Not really, but certain topics are a sore point with some people. Press them too hard about it and they get to a point where they don’t want to hear about it anymore. In Jorin’s case, he goes a bit…doolally. Not exactly Jack Torrance level shit, but it can get scary regardless. It’s one of the reasons I thought meeting him at the tavern was our best bet-public area with a dense concentration of people and cctv means less incentive to lose his patience.”

Phil can read enough between the lines to understand the finer details Teague omits for Susan’s sake. Vampires operated on the periphery of human existence and therefore weren’t inclined to show the extent of their natures when in full view of other humans. It was the reason Ashton had corralled him aside into a dark alley to enjoy a more ‘discreet meal’ and why Ashton had also begrudgingly retreated when Dan had threatened to make their fight a visible spectacle where anyone could see and potentially record them. Hard to remain an elusive myth when your face suddenly showed up in a viral video on a conspiracy theorist’s YouTube channel with the title ‘Vampires Among Us: The Video Evidence.’ In an age where information could be proliferated on social media in seconds, keeping out of sight and out of mind would be a vampire’s priority. The tentative security of the tavern’s public setting protected them from a more volatile confrontation and enabled them to make a hasty exit if necessary. It doesn’t encourage Phil’s imagination towards how well their encounter might go, but he decides one possible failsafe against harm was better than none.

He nods at Teague to show he understands the risks and reaches for the door handle.

“Don’t worry about closing the door behind you,” Susan says. “I’ve got it. As soon as it opens, just go.”

The full roar of the storm enters the car once more as the door slides up and out and Phil bows his head, tenses his shoulders and braces himself to step out into the heavy thicket of rain. Teague rushes ahead, an indistinct silhouette of grey quickly passing out of sight and Phil wastes no time following suit. He charges forward blindly towards the alley and the safe refuge of the covered scaffolding stretching out over the pavement. Usually he thought the steel network of construction scaffoldings adorning half the buildings in London like strange dystopian nests from Mad Max were unfortunate eye sores, but tonight, without an umbrella or competent jacket to protect him from the downpour, he thinks they’re a godsend. It unfortunately doesn’t prevent rain from dribbling down his neck and spine in the short span of seconds it takes for him to run under it, leaving a shivering line of cold down his back not likely to go away until they were able to duck into the tavern’s hopefully warmer interior.

“Moving to California after this, I swear.” Teague rumples his hair in aggravation to dislodge a few stray beads of water, but the rest of it remains plastered to his head in limp curls. “‘Least the only thing you have to worry about there is earthquakes, UFO’s and whatever new trend some company startup is trying to push.”

With another half muttered curse under his breath he leads the way down the alley’s narrow corridor and glances back over his shoulder. “Come on. This place can be a bit of maze to get through so be sure to follow close behind.”

Phil does so and is surprised when they veer away from the short lived refuge of the scaffolding and abruptly turn left into an adjacent alley that looks little more than a dingy open ended alcove, before they exit out to make another quick turn into yet another concrete tunnel of an alley, this one dodgier than the last. Scrawled marks of graffiti pepper the bricks along the walls, some defiantly placed over areas where the local council had removed past remnants of tags and stickers. The ones left behind to eventually be buffed away by the cleaners read off strange monikers spelled in bubbled font Phil can barely discern; others, written in black marker instead of spray paint, read off slogans and abstract observations like, ‘never kissed a tory,’ ‘your mum woz ere’ and ‘fucking waster.’ Another more incongruous one simply reads, ‘steve.’

As he heads further past gloomy lit walls slick with water and grime it feels less like he’s about to meet someone in a tavern and more like he’s being lead to the remote underground headquarters of a syndicate crime boss. It’s a remote possibility he doesn’t actually believe, but given the way his past few nights have gone, confronting him with the unexpected at every turn, he can’t help reviewing episodes of Breaking Bad in his head, hoping they won’t need anything so drastic as fulminated mercury for a backup plan if things went pear-shaped.

One more turn and, instead of a squalid drug den, Phil is relieved when they finally spill out into a tiny sequestered courtyard crowded on all sides by buildings that look as if they haven’t changed since the eighteenth century. There are suddenly flagstones under his feet and iron cast street lamps hanging over his head. It’s to the point he almost expects to hear the click and whirr of horse drawn carriages echoing off from the street. He looks to his left to see the tavern itself and the stained paneled wood making up its façade, the elegant scrollwork embedded in the etched frosting on the lead windows and the old wine barrels propped around the perimeter furthers the impression of having stepped into a time and place which shouldn’t exist anymore. Maybe in the daytime it was more picturesque, but in the murk of the storm it’s only eerie.

There’s a strong sense of displacement here at odds with the London he recognizes. Even with the mixed composite of architectural designs throughout the city melding past and present together so that it wasn’t uncommon to see austere Brutalist monoliths existing in close proximity to more classical examples of Tudor and Georgian houses, here the past feels too densely concentrated as if this were the set for a period film where actors dressed in powdered wigs and knee breeches might round the corner at any second as soon as the director offstage yelled action. If not for the signs advertising acceptable payment via credit card and the security cameras discreetly tucked away over the porthole entryway doors, he could almost believe Teague had led him into a wormhole transporting them a few centuries back into the 1700’s.

He continues to follow closely as Teague marches forward without batting an eye and pushes his way through the doors into the tavern’s warmly lit foyer where they pause for a moment with water dripping from their clothes in small streams onto the floor.

A waft of comfortable heat envelops Phil at once, enough to melt away the layers of cold from his skin like peeling off a soggy jumper and after a sigh of relief to be out of the rain his first thought is to consider it a stroke of good luck the tavern was even open to begin with. His second thought is how odd it is to see they’re not alone. There’s a small but sizeable crowd of patrons in what he assumes is the main dining room off to his left and he wonders if they were local neighbors that had made the trip over for a laugh or commuters who had simply become stranded and, for lack of anything else better to do, had opted to wait out the storm between bites of sausage and sips of beer.

 _Just like any other tavern_ , he thinks. _No time paradoxes, breeches or horse drawn carriages, just a place with a flair for character and history. Unless this really is a movie set and I’m about to be included in the unofficial remake of Faintheart, where everyone’s preparing to reenact as frock coated aristocrats instead of Vikings._

Yet, even here, inside, surrounded by obvious markers of technology and modernity with Axl Rose’s distinctive wail trailing out from the small radio set in the corner by the bar, the creak of stressed floorboards under his feet and the lacquered mahogany stained wood running up the stairs and through the halls, past faded monochrome portraits of people from a bygone era, all give off an Old World vibe which reminds him of how this place must have looked centuries before the Great Fire razed half of London to the ground, when the building code was still defined by slats of timber instead of brick and stone.

As if reading his mind, Teague pauses in the middle of discreetly wringing out the hem of his hoodie onto the floor mat by the door and turns back to him with a murmured aside.  
“I know the place looks a bit dated, but it’s by design. It’s one of the few places left in London that hasn’t changed much in 250 years and the main reason why Jorin frequents it so often. This was his favorite haunt back when it first opened in 1757. Still is actually. He used to come here to listen in on conversations and occasionally trawl the merchant crowd for a worthy mark to feed on. So you could say he never used the tavern in its traditional sense, but then again it served him much the same purpose- a place where he could easily find a bit of talk and a bit of drink.”

“Sounds like for him, hanging around a place like Mcdonald’s for someone to bite wouldn’t have the same appeal,” Phil says.

“God, no. Besides, all those Big Macs make the blood taste awful. Too much concentrated sodium and greasy processed meat. Bite into someone with a regular diet of butties and burgers and you’ll regret your life decisions for a month.” Teague feigns a shudder and laughs. “But it’s more like I told you before- some of us don’t acclimate well to the world changing around us while we remain the same. I think it comforts him to know as much as the London he used to remember has changed, this is the one recognizable place left that hasn’t been taken over by fast food chains and redevelopment projects. It’s just intimidating to watch places that were part of defining moments in our lives be washed away with time and modern progress. Some of us cling to the last remnants of our past the best we can, if only for nostalgia’s sake, if only to feel like we’re coming back home after a long time away.”

Teague looks around with a vaguely wistful expression Phil can empathize with. It was the same way he’d looked at his old family home the last time he’d visited before it had been sold. He’d since then gone on to buy a place of his own and proudly furnish it with his own décor and memories, but it had still been bittersweet to say goodbye to the house he’d grown up in, knowing that if and when he ever did see it again, it might no longer look the same. In time it would change according to the whims of its new owners, adapt to accommodate new memories and family milestones or perhaps one day, by a strange quirk of synchronicity, a boy much like himself might be sat in front of a computer, a slimmer more streamlined version of the hulking Commodore 64 Phil had once owned, playing Bubble Bobble in a playroom with walls painted a garish pink as hamsters in clear hollow balls rolled softly around the floor.  
It was strange to think his old room now belonged to somebody else who might have stripped down the wallpaper and redone the flooring to make his once comfortable, if small, bedroom into a study or storage area, effectively erasing any traces he had once been there at all. If letting go of his old home had been strangely more emotional than he originally thought, he can only imagine how harrowing it might be as an immortal to watch familiar landmarks become unrecognizable or be replaced with loud thoroughfares full of people asserting their mark on history to make it their own. It was only a natural part of life, to improve and innovate on what had come before, but it makes him wonder how he would feel to move away from their flat and return years later to find it had been replaced with a commercial office or taken down entirely to make way for whatever building project London Councils had approved as its new venture into ‘urban progress,’ so that the only proof two people named Dan and Phil had once lived there, had once filmed videos in its halls and rooms, would be in old playlists online or in photos on his hard drive like obsolete antiques. Maybe as an immortal, when the advent of the future grew too insistent and all the robotic marvels he’d once looked forward to became overwhelming, he might also find a reason to take refuge in a restaurant that hadn’t changed in 250 years, where things still looked as they did back in the 21st century and he could pretend the world outside looked the same.

Teague shakes his head as if to keep from losing himself further in the moment and continues. “Either way, whatever helps to keep Jorin calm and comfortable works in our favor to make him more amenable to speaking with us. Now, we just need to figure out where he is. Place may not look big on the outside, but there’s three floors to choose from and I don’t fancy a wild goose chase.”

“Where does he usually sit?”

“Anywhere the mood suits him. The place isn’t as busy as it normally is what with the storm, so it shouldn’t be difficult to sift through and find him-”

“You two lost?”

A voice interrupts and they both turn towards the small designated bar area where the bartender, a man with a frothy dark beard, short cropped graying hair and a heavily jowled face like a bulldog, peers at them with interest as he wipes down the countertop.

“We’re looking for someone-a regular of yours,” Teague replies as he approaches the bar.

“We get a lot of regulars. Most of them bankers, city workers and students with faces that all blend together come lunch hour.”

“You’d remember this one, I’m sure. He’s been a customer for longer than you’d probably remember. Goes by Jorin? Somewhat scruffy clothes, only comes here in the evenings?”

At first the man looks only skeptical, but at Teague’s description of Jorin’s clothes and nocturnal habits his expression clears into one of recognition.

“Is that his name then? Jorin? Never knew that. We just called him Billy.”

At the confused silence the bartender clarifies. “As in Billy no-mates? We don’t get many people asking after him. You’d be the first. He usually sits over there in the back corner of the Grill Room by the window and keeps schtum. Not that I mind, but he always does that.”

“Does what,” Phil asks.

“Sits down, orders the same porter and stays there for the rest of the night not touching a drop of it. Don’t know why he bothers just to let it go to waste, but he pays his tab, minds his manners and tips well so I can’t complain.” He points towards the room behind them, what appears to be the main dining area of the restaurant, where Phil can see the words ‘Grill Room’ written in gold tipped font over the lintel of the entryway. “You can find him back there now.”

Phil offers a hasty thanks as he turns to follow Teague into the Grill Room itself, doing his best to skirt around waiters laden with trays of food to serve the sparse but lively crowd of people sharing tables and conversation. In a way he feels as if he’s navigating his own version of a balcony road as he tries to avoid colliding with people and mugs of coffee through the precariously narrow lanes between seating arrangements, but he finally makes it to the back of the room without incident as Teague pauses before a bench tucked away into the corner.

Phil’s not sure what he expected Jorin to look like, but it certainly isn’t the wraithlike figure before them. A man, lean figured and gaunt, sits alone, hunched over the table while staring out the window presumably at nothing, not with the view outside obscured by the reflected glare of the lights overhead and the steadily falling sheet of rain down the glass. True to Teague’s description, the man’s clothing is careworn and rumpled with dark creased jeans, the knees of which are stiff and bronzed with so much dirt they might be able to stand up on their own when taken off, and a faded red button down shirt that looks as if it hasn’t seen an iron in months. His tangled hair appears as if it hasn’t seen a comb in longer. Set him down on a flattened square of cardboard outside a train station and he’d be indistinguishable from the numbers of homeless who called small sections of London pavement their home or from the one who had memorably christened Phil with the name ‘Sideways Gary’ when he’d taken a bad detour into the man’s self-made bedsit on a dead end street. The man at the table however offers nothing by way of colorful nicknames or an acknowledgment of their presence, instead continuing to stare at his own reflection in the window with an unsettling vacant expression that makes Phil nervous all over again.

“Jorin?”

At first the man doesn’t move, but Teague tries again, speaking in the low reassuring tone of a crisis negotiator talking someone off a tall cliff and this time Jorin frowns, eyebrows knitting together as if struggling to recall a vital detail. He turns his head stiffly to look between Teague and Phil with rheumy bloodshot eyes and all at once Phil’s not sure if he preferred it better when Jorin hadn’t been aware of them. There’s a flighty quality to his movements, a vaguely predatory air, the same as Dan had exhibited when his hunger had overridden every sensible instinct leaving nothing rational behind to reason with. Phil isn’t struck with the same impression of impending danger, but there’s a palpable sense of unpredictability to the man he doesn’t much want to test.

“Jorin….? It’s me.” Teague offers a light touch on the man’s shoulder and like a flipped switch, the lingering confusion on his face gives way to lucid familiarity. He straightens up with such abrupt speed Phil involuntarily flinches backwards, but Teague moves to shake Jorin’s hand as he extends it in greeting.

“Teague,” the man says and his voice sounds dry and cracked with prolonged disuse. “There’s a face I haven’t seen in ages. Haven’t seen anyone in ages really. You’d think it was something I said.”

He gestures for them both to have a seat on the bench across from him with rapid wheeling gestures of his left hand. “Well, go on and stay awhile. Give me an excuse to remember what it’s like to have good conversation.”

Teague slides onto the bench after Phil and folds his hands on the table, clenching his fingers in a visible display of unease. “So, Jorin, are you-”

“Are you asking if I’m alright? Okay? The usual boring niceties no one really cares to know the answer to at all?” Juey gives an exaggerated smile too wide for his face, revealing his fangs like large quotation marks bookending his teeth. “I am absolutely okay, tickety boo, ha ha, and how about you then? How’s the slow onset of madness through the centuries treating you?”

Teague shrugs. “Ever since Netflix was invented, not so bad.”

“Oh yes, true. All one needs now is a queue of good shark documentaries and Game of Thrones to forget you’re one day closer to going round the twist. And they say television is bad for you.” He nods in agreement with himself and continues nodding for longer than strictly necessary, but cuts off short when he turns turn to fixate on Phil as if noticing him for the first time. “And who’s your friend? Lee Ingleby’s lost cousin?”

“Erm, no. I’m Phil.”

‘I’m Phil.’” Jorin’s voice pitches an octave lower in a passable impression of Phil’s baritone. “Now, there’s a northern accent if I ever heard one. Sure you’re not related to Ingleby?”  
Lost for an appropriate reply, Phil settles for shaking his head, becoming more apprehensive by the second with the unblinking watery red eyed stare directed at him.  
“Nah, you’re handsomer for one, taller for another. No resemblance at all. No idea why it occurred to me. Must be all this beer I’ve had tonight.” Jorin holds up the full glass of porter and laughs with the graveled sound of a career smoker. “Now, here’s the real question for you: A human and a vampire walk into a bar. Why?”

He doesn’t have a mind for riddles, not with the storm beating against the glass to remind him their time was short and every minute sitting here was a precious opportunity wasted, but as their only source of information was a vampire who might or might not help them depending on how well they could play along without upsetting him, Phil tries to relax and forces himself to hold Jorin’s gaze. “Er-I’m not sure. Why?”

“I don’t know. I thought you’d tell me.” He gives another painfully dry croak of a laugh as Phil and Teague exchange uneasy glances.

“No, no, don’t tell me. I know what this is.” Jorin wags a finger at them both like a reproving parent who’d just caught their child in flagrante delicto. “You think I don’t, but I do. Yes, I do. You’re asking me for help or else you wouldn’t be here. That’s what this is- ships that pass in the night and speak each other in passing. And so it goes, so it goes, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. That’s the usual way of it. What do you say? Am I right? Am I?”

Teague swallows audibly and says nothing, looking more than a bit guilty.

“I am right. Of course. Of course. I usually am you know, but no one ever listens to me anymore. Like a bad case of Cassandra affliction.”

“Cassandra affliction?” Phil’s never been more confused the more Jorin rambles on, but Teague discreetly gestures for him to let it go.

“Here now, that’s not entirely true. I used to listen to you, Jorin. You know that. Time just has a funny way of making people strangers for no particular reason other than unfortunate circumstances.”

“That’s a very polite way of putting it, my gradual losing touch with reality as an ‘unfortunate circumstance.’ But it’s true. You always did lend an ear whenever you stopped in to see me. You were one of the few who dared to sit with me and talk after I left…after I left the....” He grimaces in the manner of someone who had just taken a swallow of hard liquor and abandons the sentence altogether, but Phil can piece together the words he leaves behind. “Anyway, you weren’t scared of me then.”

“Do I seem scared now?”

“No. Just nervous as a schoolboy about to ask someone on a date. You’ve got a question for me and you don’t much like having to ask it. It has something or other to do with your Phil friend. Even if I couldn’t read you, he’s got anxiety pouring off him like bad cologne.” Jorin wags his finger again in an accusatory wobble. “You’re here, but you’d both rather be somewhere else. This isn’t a social call because you missed catching up and wanted to introduce me to your new human acquaintance.”

“No, you’re right.” Teague sighs. “No point dancing around the issue, not when we’re pressed for time as it is. I’m here now because we need your help.”

“That much is crystal. For what and why is the other real question.”

“They have his friend-”

“Who does? The fuzz? The queen? Mormons?

Teague closes his eyes and the knuckles of his fingers turn a paler shade of white as he clenches his hands tighter on the table.

“The Night Court.” He finally says it in a rush and Jorin goes deathly quiet. Even with the quiet rumble of voices in the background breaking out into occasional bouts of laughter and the constant rattle of rain against the window and explosive bursts of thunder in the sky, Jorin’s silence is loud enough to drown out every sound to nothing but atmospheric static.

Then, after a long tense moment of nothing but the same vacuous stare, Jorin leans forward across the table and breathes the word, ‘no’ in a guttural tone of finality.

“Jorin, look-”

“No.”

“Just give me a minute to explain-”

“No.”

Teague’s face takes on an angry flush. “Oi, this is important alright, just listen to me-!”

“No! I said no!” Jorin slams the table with an open faced swat of his palm and the glass of porter next to him jumps a foot into the air, spilling half of its contents in a dark puddle across the untouched place settings. “I don’t care if it’s important. I don’t care if it’ll only take a minute. They took centuries from me and I’m not giving them a minute or a half second more. I’m old enough and tired enough to be able not to give a damn. I’m done with them. If they have his friend you might as well start writing the eulogy now and save time, so how about you pop off back into the ether where you came from, take your human with you and leave me alone.”

The comfortable buzz of talk around them gives way to low murmurs and interested stares from people Phil hopes aren’t subscribers as they turn around to inspect the source of the sudden outburst. A server pauses in the aisle with a quizzical look towards their table, but Teague shakes his head in a way to suggest for her to forget about it. She concedes with a shrug and when she turns back to jotting down the order of the table in front of her the rest of the room follows her lead, gradually looking away and resuming the placid flow of private conversations. Jorin meanwhile appears resolute on resuming the vacant appraisal of his own reflection in the window and makes a point to studiously ignore either of them.

 _We have one chance_ , Phil thinks, _one small opportunity to get the answer we need to find Dan and if Jorin refuses to help us, then it ends here. Everything comes down to effort and trying, but what am I supposed to try when he doesn’t want to hear anything we might have to say? If I were a vampire I could try that ‘glamour’ trick Dan told me about to see if I could somehow convince him to speak with us. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t work on other vampires and they’d just cancel each other out, like trying to push two magnets of the same polarity together or maybe more like two Jedi stuck in a mind trick face-off._

He starts to trail off on an imaginative tangent of picturing the exact scenario of two vampires caught in a silent battle of wills, each one trying to force choke the other in an awkward duel like a strange Adult Swim sketch when he catches himself in time and snaps back to the present moment.

_Right. Focus. I have to say something before he dismisses us completely, but what can I say, what do I do?_

_“Establish common ground. In the end, that’s what it all comes down to, don’t you think?”_

The answer comes to him in the form of the voice of his brother’s girlfriend, Cornelia, on one occasion when she’d visited the flat and the conversation had segued from discussing music to what exactly made the process of creating lyrical sound so intrinsically satisfying and universally appealing. He’s not surprised his subconscious would so quickly provide the memory of their conversation as encouragement in his current situation. Speaking with Cornelia always had the effect of a fresh breeze through an open window, at once clarifying and pleasant even in the most troublesome of times. She had a welcoming air about her with an undercurrent of fierce curiosity to complement Phil’s so that he never felt guarded speaking in her presence or wary that she might not accept all the varied quirks of his personality. On the occasion in question, she’d sat in the lounge, a jovial red haired Muse perched on the edge of their sofa with an omnichord resting in her lap like a futuristic lyre, plucking out the tune to a new song she’d just written as Phil had sat at the table listening to her voice echoing around the room in a hypnotic trill, both resonant and sweet.

After a gust of prompt, heartfelt applause when the last strains of song had died away, he’d asked her, “think I could write something that good one day?”

“Of course.” She’d looked mildly amused he even had to question it. “Weren’t you telling me about one you’d started scribbling down last week?”

“Oh that. I don’t know. I hit writer’s block halfway through and never picked it up again. I’m trying, but I can’t find anything to rhyme with ‘internet.’”

“Hmm. Tricky one.” She’d looked off towards the ceiling and rocked backwards slowly in thought. Dan had been stood in the hallway speaking with Phil’s brother and as his voice had bubbled up into the lounge in a froth of laughter at something Martyn said, Cornelia had smiled and come to with a sudden idea. “Without the internet, you both never would have met.”

Phil had considered it for a moment, turning the phrase over in his mind, mystified over how easy it had been for her to take a word and engineer a lyric out of it, but then again, for an accomplished musician like her, perhaps it was only second nature to look at the world and find the potential for a song hiding in something as simple as a spoken phrase.  
“Too much of a stretch?”

“No, no, I like it and it’s true,” he’d said finally. “Much better than ‘splinternet’ anyway. I was stuck on that one for a while.”

“It doesn’t always have to rhyme if you don’t want it to.”

“I know, but it always feels more satisfying when it does. Like finding the right pieces to a puzzle and slotting them into place. I don’t know what it is exactly-you know, what it is about creating music-or anything really-that feels so good?”

“I’d guess it’s about scratching that innate itch of creativity everyone has,” she’d said. “It’s such a human thing after all- answering an urge to physically express ourselves in a variety of different and beautiful ways and sharing them with each other. You do it all the time.”

“I do?”

“Sure. You connect with people of different creeds and cultures and backgrounds every day-each with their own identities and ways of expressing themselves, yet they all come together on your channel to see your perspective of the world. They like what you create, because it motivates them to see the world differently too and create something for themselves, in the same way to really appreciate someone’s creativity you have to meet it halfway with your own. It’s all about a meeting of the minds; establishing common ground. In the end, I think that’s what it all comes down to, don’t you think?”

She’d smiled and ran her finger down the omnichord’s touch plate in a riffling stream of notes. “That’s what music is or what it tries to do. You take words and weave a story out of sound for them to live in and when you’re done it feels like you’ve connected to something inside yourself, like you’ve made a connection with other people. That’s what you do every day without the benefit of a song.”

The random chords of music under her fingers had come together in a soothing lullaby of a chorus he didn’t recognize but had stayed in his head long after she’d left. “I think we’re all trying not to feel lonely. We all want to feel secure and heard and appreciated; to find the right words and rhythm to go along with the feeling that we belong. Creating something; talking with one another- it all serves the same purpose. To understand and connect.”

He can’t think of what if anything he shared in common with a vampire much older than Teague who had probably witnessed things unspoken of even in the most obscure of history books, but in some ways perhaps they weren’t so different. For one, they both had important placeholders full of meaning and personal significance. For Jorin it was the tavern and for Phil it was Dan. Maybe Cornelia was right. Appealing to a sensibility they both shared might encourage Jorin to speak.

 _Establish common ground. Speak to connect_ , he thinks. _It’s worth a shot. I have nothing else to lose at this point._

“This place means a lot to you, doesn’t it?” Phil speaks quickly to get his point across in enough time to prevent Jorin from interrupting and sending him on his way.  
“I’ve seen the pictures on the walls-there’s so much history here, so many memories and you’ve probably experienced them all.”

Jorin glances at him through a tangle of bedraggled hair and says nothing. His fingers curl around the half empty pint glass as if he might at any moment raise it to take a drink.

“If they decided to close the tavern for good and tear it down, it’d affect you,” Phil continues. “It’d be like losing a part of yourself.”

A crunching, grinding squeal of protest answers him as a fissured crack appears in the side of the glass in Jorin’s hand, winding its way up the base to the rim like a sudden stroke of lightning.

“Breaking points, mate,” Teague mutters under his breath, but Phil takes the gamble and persists.

“If this place were to be demolished tomorrow and you had a choice to do something about it, to stop it from happening, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” Jorin looks dazedly at the small rill of dark liquid seeping over his knuckles onto the tabletop. “Maybe I should have given this place up years ago and moved on the way the rest of the city has. Given a choice, maybe I’d let it become a pile of rubble. Sometimes you need to learn how to let go of the past, but that’s never come natural to me. I seethe and dwell and linger until it rots me.” He tenses his forefinger against his thumb and flicks the glass, splitting the seam of the break into a riot of hairline fractures which hold their shape for a single quivering second before shattering the glass entirely with a crunching snap. The rest of the porter splashes out in a dark puddle of foam and slivered shards, stopping just shy of cascading over the table’s edge.

“But then again, my issues are my own. This place has nothing to do with it. Just an innocent bystander to my eroding tolerance for immortality. If it came down to it, maybe I would try and protect it-preserve one of my last remaining refuges against the tides of time. Some places are too important not to try and save.”

“Some people too,” Phil says.

“Ah.” Jorin inclines his head in a mock bow of acknowledgement. “Clever, you. Very clever. I see your game. Well played.”

“I’m not trying to play a game, but you understand what I mean. You won’t give this place up and I feel the same way about Dan.”

“Dan is the friend what needs help I take it?”

“Yes. We’re not asking you to involve yourself. Just tell us where the Court is, where they might have taken him and we’ll go.”

“Mmm. Now that’s a story I’ve heard before, but with a few key differences. What do you say, Teague? Sound familiar?”

Teague looks away. “Don’t start in on me. I already told him what happened and he still wants to do this. I’m helping him. End of story.”

“End of story? I think this is just the prologue. One human and a vampire who might as well be a whelp about to take on the entire Court to save a new blood.” At Phil’s look of surprise, Jorin nods. “Oh, I know he’s one of us. He bit you good, didn’t he? Your Dan.”

Phil startles as Jorin leans across the table, scenting the air as if sniffing a fine perfume. He never breaks eye contact as he winds closer to Phil’s arm, sinuously twining his head down to follow the invisible line of scent to its source.

“Oh, yes. I can smell him on you like a fever.”  
His hand strikes out in a sudden arc of white to seize Phil’s arm and despite the layers of clothing hiding the healed over marks of Dan’s bite from view, Jorin digs his thumb into the exact spot as if he could plainly see it.

“Had his first taste of human blood and you had your first real look at what we are. So, how did it go? Was it everything like the movies?” His hand curls into a restrictive cuff and Phil’s heart thuds faster in response, remembering how easily Jorin had split the pint glass in two with a simple flick of his fingers. “Or was it better than fiction? Gave you a rush like no other, I’d bet. Better than any dose of smack and citric. Did you want to go and get him back so he could finish the job? Send you off again on a little cloud of blissful blood loss? Hm? Or do you want him to turn you so you can join the graveyard shift with the rest of us?”

Phil’s not sure how, but as Jorin clenches his fist to punctuate every question, the cold of his fingers penetrates through the jacket’s sleeve to the bare skin of Phil’s arm underneath like puncturing icicles. It reminds him of Dan’s relentless grip and the startling new extent of a power he’d barely been able to control. Jorin by contrast was a significantly older vampire with the experience necessary to understand how to control his strength, but the look on his face, a mix of jeering cynicism overlaid with crazed grief, makes his intentions unreadable and chaotic.

“In the old stories, humans were saved from the monsters. They didn’t willingly run back after having its fangs in their flesh. So, tell me, are you masochistic?” Jorin’s hand clenches, a slight twinge, nothing more, but it’s enough to send a fresh bolt of pain to jerk Phil backwards in his seat.

Teague immediately seethes, hissing “ _oi!_ ” under his breath and Phil tries to pull away, but Jorin holds fast. “Maybe not so masochistic then. So why come to me and ask for help finding him when you know what he’s capable of, when you’re just a little human plodding along in a world where you don’t belong?”

His eyes bore into Phil with a cadaverous intensity that too disturbingly resembles the haggard ghost from the Grudge, vengeful and implacable. The impression is so powerful Phil wouldn’t be surprised if Jorin opened his mouth and let out a grating death rattle from the back of his throat, although if he does, Phil thinks the only breaking point they’ll have to worry about reaching is his own. As it is, he’s not sure how much more of this encounter he can take. His hand flushes a mottled red from the force of Jorin’s hand blocking all circulation and Phil knows without being able to see under the jacket’s sleeve the rest of his arm up to his elbow must look the same. A numbing pain edges its way towards his fingers, the tips of which have already turned a ripe unhealthy purple. A degree more of pressure and he won’t be able to feel his hand or arm at all.

With restrained desperation, Teague thuds a fist into the table. The broken glass jumps and quivers away from the force of the strike and he leans forward, fangs gritted in a snarl around another low hiss for Jorin to back off. “Come on, man. You’re hurting him. I may not be able to kill you, but if I have to I’ll damn well try. I don’t care who sees us. He’s under my protection. So, I’m warning you... _Let. Him. Go._ ”

Jorin doesn’t answer and he doesn’t release Phil’s arm, but the closing circle of his grip bearing down like a hydraulic press abruptly stops. He continues to stare with the same vacant ire, the whites of his eyes smattered with more petechial splotches as if the strain of simply speaking had been enough to rupture blood vessels.

Phil never breaks eye contact, but it’s a struggle not to look away, to not just demand Teague pull Jorin off so they could leave and find someone else who could give them answers without him feeling like the protagonist of a live action horror game where the half mad vampire across the table might lurch forward like a bad jumpscare at any moment. His heart rate jitters at a breakneck pace he can feel pulsing along the side of his neck down to the wrenching grip on his arm, but he’s determined to win this standoff. He’s certain Jorin’s only testing his resolve, trying to see what will make him break away and run. Phil has an idea, as a former member of the Night Court with a self-proclaimed loose grip on reality, Jorin’s used to people running away from him for a variety of reasons.

_Not that it doesn’t sound like a much better idea than staying here pretending I’m not completely weirded out and terrified, he thinks. But if this is what it takes for him to speak with us then I have to try. He could have tossed us both to the floor with one finger by now if he really wanted to, but he hasn’t. Well…yet, anyway. He’s interested in my reasons. I just have to be convincing._

He continues to have faith in his previous theory of speaking to connect, only now the situation has evolved the message slightly to that of speaking to survive, namely with his limbs intact.

“I’m sorry you’re bothered by this, by us coming here to disturb you,” he says. “I’m not trying to have a go at you. Like I said before, this isn’t about anything else other than finding Dan and bringing him back home. I know it must sound ridiculous and I understand Dan is supposed to be powerful and dangerous and maybe he is now, but he’s also still Dan. He was capable of doing more damage than just a bite on my arm from the first moment I stepped foot into the house, but he never did. He could have abused his power to manipulate and terrorize people he knew wouldn’t be able to stop him if he tried, including me, but he didn’t. And I could have demanded he turn me without either of us being prepared for what might happen next, but I didn’t. We could’ve walked away from each other from the outset, but we didn’t and I don’t want to now. I need to do this-I want-I-”

Phil pauses around a sudden rush of frustration making the next words difficult to find and tries to calm the thudding pulse drumming along his jaw with a frenetic intensity powerful enough to make his molars ache. He’s not sure anything he’s said had connected enough to convey half of everything he wishes to. He’d hardly been able to explain the extent of his affections and appreciation for Dan while alone in the private solace of his bedroom. Trying to validate his reasons for following after Dan to a vampire who might be too jaded with the entire experience of immortality to empathize with his plight leaves Phil with a daunting sense of futility. This wasn’t like filming a video where he could cover every nuance of a topic with sound bites and music and visual effects to make a simple anecdote into a sensory experience equal to how he’d felt in the moment in the hopes his audience might be able to relate. Even then, he’s not certain what help, if any, that would be in this current situation. Trying to encompass all of how he felt about Dan and why it justified his reasons for risking death to find him is more complex than he can convey with any spoken explanation or filmed narrative. Every reason he had were largely personal ones, too intimate and abstract to confess to a stranger in any way that was appropriate or comfortable.

Once more he’s aware of being only human, of being only Phil. Once more words fall short to say what he means and he wishes he could be done with explanations and placating speeches to arrive at the point of having Dan beside him again, safe and sound, without the muddled complications of giving a tedious dissertation they don’t have time for. Patience had always been a thinly accepted virtue, usually tempered by his desire to find the most practical efficient path to a quick and satisfying resolution. Prolonged conflicts and confrontations made him uncomfortable. He never enjoyed lingering too long when he found himself in the middle of one, more so when the probability of a loved one’s safety hinged on his being able to resolve the matter in time enough to find them.

He’s aware of Teague and Jorin’s weighted stares, of their expectant silence as if they were waiting for him to perform a magic trick and produce a dramatic end to the sentence he’d left half finished, when really he only feels as if he’s about to commit the verbal equivalent of jamming a needle into his palm all over again.

 _What am I supposed to say? I just want things to be as they were. Maybe it can never be exactly the same given how everything has changed, with how much we’ve changed as a result, but I’d like us to be okay again- for us to make it okay. Together. That’s all I want_ , he thinks. _I just want Dan here. I just want us to go home._

Jorin’s hand remains on his arm, refusing to yield until he gives an answer; Teague hovers close, ready to intervene if necessary and outside the storm continues unabated, as it would until morning, regardless of any answers he gave. Time is short and growing shorter still, but he can’t sufficiently condense all his feelings into a pithy declaration that would only sell Dan short for how important and essential he’d become. In a situation where every word counted, what was the right thing to say? What was wrong? The stress of wondering if Jorin might reject his explanations if he chose poorly makes Phil clench his hands rigid on the table and the dull throb of his pulse coalesces into the beginnings of a headache. It trickles along his temples and behind his eyes with the same steadily increasing pressure Jorin had used on his arm.

_Be in your body, not in your head._

Once more, Dan’s voice murmurs up from his subconscious to remind him things always had a better chance of going smoothly the less he overthought them and with that advice bright in his mind, he tries to focus on anything other than the two vampires staring at him, waiting for a reply that refuses to come easily.

The music in the background has long since faded away from Sweet Child O’ Mine to a subdued acoustic soul rhythm. The harmony is simple and melodic; a soothing contrast to the complex bluster of the wind and rain against the window at his back and he immediately seizes on it as a calming reprieve from the uncomfortable tension of the moment. It’s there, in the strident portions of the song’s verse, discernable over the riot of the storm and the consistent ripple of conversations around him, that he finds a better explanation than he could ever try to give.

 

If you love a soul, more than fame and gold  
And that soul feels the same about you.  
It’s a natural fact, there’s no turning back.  
And here’s some advise to you.  
You got to say it’s you and me.

 

You and me, the chorus goes on to reaffirm in a happy euphonic chant and he thinks of course. Me and him. What other simpler explanation do I need?

After Dan had made a home in his thoughts, more crucial and affirming than any accolades he might later receive in his career- Dan who would make such accolades worth receiving in the first place by virtue of his presence and constant dedication-there had never been a question of turning back. Not in Manchester when they’d lived hand to mouth trying to make their lives and living with each other work, not in London when they’d moved to a new place with new fears and tentative hopes and definitely not now when everything was different and uncertain, dialed up to a point of critical urgency where turning back might be the salient option.

_But I could never turn my back on the years we’ve spent working towards the same goals and ambitions together; on all the things we’ve created together; all the sleepless nights and indulgent mornings; all the ways we’ve tried so hard to be happy on our own terms; the ways we’ve tried to build something good and sustainable around that idea together. We’ve made too many strides and too many important memories I want to protect and create more of, to just throw it away now that things are confusing and difficult. He’s always given me courage to try, no matter how much I doubted myself in the past, no matter how bleak things appeared to be and I’m going to keep trying. For him; because of him. Because he’s always done the same for me._

The song continues its refrain of ‘you and me’ in a lilting encouragement to reinforce his thoughts and before he can second guess himself again, Phil decides at last the best response he can give Jorin is an honest one.

“This has nothing to do with feeling obligated or blindly ignoring risks,” he says, “I understand the danger. I know what I’m up against, but I’m not going anywhere until I see him again. Because I care for him, because I want to know he’s safe, because the good moments have always outweighed the rough ones and I want to try and fight for things to be good again-but mostly, I’m here because he’s always been worth the risk. Walking away from him has never been an option and it never will be.”

Jorin hesitates. In turn, the aura of gleeful directionless fury surrounding him falters and dies away until he looks only tired and distantly troubled. The clenched hold on Phil’s arm loosens to a gentle weight and Teague’s restless on edge posture relaxes backwards in wary relief.

“You’re a fool. A kind fool, which is the worst sort to be,” Jorin says softly and shakes his head. “You say you understand, but you don’t know the half of it. He bit you. He’ll have developed a taste for you. Now the Night Court’s taken him they’ll help him develop a taste for other things, for worse things. They’ll show him everything he’s truly capable of and school him in the art of true monstrosity until you won’t recognize him as the Dan you once knew before. You don’t want to invite that back into your life.”

“Teague explained what could happen, but as I told him, Dan isn’t the type to be easily manipulated. And anyway, I mean to get to him before they can try.”

“And what makes you think you’ll get to him in time or that he’ll want to come back at all? Your faith in him is admirable for a pair of rose tinted glasses.” Jorin holds up a broken shard of glass dripping with beer in front of his face like a makeshift monocle before tossing it back onto the table with a hollow clatter. “You’re not seeing the real picture. New bloods lack direction, they’re reeling in power and freedom they have no idea what to do with and it’s just the right time for the Court to provide their own kind of direction and special brand of education, to make a new blood feel like they’re finally coming into their own when really, they’re just dancing to the court’s tune.”

Jorin trails off with a small bitter laugh and dances the fingers of his free hand across the table in a jittering circuit over the spilled puddle of beer. “It’s a lovely one really. I quite liked the music at the time, loved it so much in fact it took me centuries to wake up and realize it was the same bad radio edit on a loop.”

“They’ll make him feel empowered,” he continues. “They’ll replace his old friends with better, more powerful, interesting and influential ones. He’ll never want for a bed of lovers-all of them more beautiful than any centerfold model or Oscar winning actor. Money? Prestige? Recognition? The Night Court enables any vice. All with the endgame of collaring him like a dog, taking the bite of independent thought out of him and making him their pet until he’ll crawl and keen and bark on command. Maybe even literally if that’s to his taste. I can’t judge, some people just need to put on a collar to unwind and heel at someone’s feet for a while. While I was with the Court I saw it all, indulged in some of it too, not every guilty pleasure is a crime you know, but petplay aside, he’ll belong to them in the strictest sense of the word. What’s more, he’ll [i]want[/i] to belong to them. Take it from someone who knows.” Jorin withdraws his slack hold on Phil’s arm and slouches despondently against the back of his seat.

“Not to be disrespectful,” Phil says, “but Dan isn’t you. If he wants to stay with the Court then I’d rather he tell me that face to face than assume the worst.”

“Not to be contrarian, but you barely understand what he is now and neither does he. It’s not about assuming the worst, it’s about the truth. A new blood is just a fledgling monster struggling to shake off the last pesky dregs of human inhibition to become something more. Like a caterpillar struggling to escape a chrysalis and become a horrific Lepidoptera. They’re drowning in a high of sensations while stumbling along, afraid of what to make of their new transformation-afraid of what to make of themselves anymore. Every vampire is at their most vulnerable in this stage. That’s why the Night Court is such a tempting option. Give someone with a weak opinion about themselves and their future a convincing rhetoric promising revolutionary change at a time when they think they’re powerless to affect anything for themselves and they’ll leap at the opportunity. Never mind if the details are vague and the asking price is every bit of autonomous will. You’re lucky the Court took him when they did, so one day you won’t have to wake up and find how frustrated he is to be with you, a human who can offer him nothing but problems. Eventually he’d have started to grow restless for something that catered more to his interests than your own; for a life that isn’t about walking on eggshells around you for your benefit, so he can be just as unrestrained and vocal as he wants to be without you around to fetter him. If the Court hadn’t taken him there’s a good chance he’d have either destroyed you in a fit of pique or joined the Court willingly himself. There are no other options.”

“Well, Teague isn’t like that. He was once a new blood too and he never joined the Court. He never hurt people,” Phil points out. He looks pointedly at Teague with the expectation for him to agree, but Teague glances away with sudden interest at the floor and shifts uncomfortably in place.

“So...it’s not as if I like to admit this, but for a while, back when I was just cutting my teeth on blood for the first time, I…wasn’t any different than what Jorin describes. I didn’t know enough about the Court at first and yeah, it seemed like a cushy deal better than shambling through each evening drunk on power I didn’t know I wanted and couldn’t control like an addict on a bad trip.” Teague continues to examine the floorboards. “You have to understand, being turned is like going through adolescence all over again. It’s a back and forth between yourself and the world, complete with power struggles and coming to grips with your identity and sometimes the people you love the most get caught in the crossfire of you trying to figure yourself out. It’s worse when it’s a human and the collateral damage ends up being their life. In that way, the Court seemed like a shelter against the storm before I learned better.”

“You’re kind of supposed to be on my side here…” Phil mutters.

“I know, I know, and I am but he has a point.”

“And so what-am I supposed to give up on him now that he’s been taken and be grateful for it?” He frowns. “You’re both exchanging stories of what he might do or what might happen, but none of it has. He’s my friend-not a statistic. I mean, he’s never really kept to the expected norm in anything, whether it’s opting out of uni for an unconventional career or wearing designer shirts in styles I’d never think of wearing myself. What I’m saying is, he’s always figured out his own way around things despite popular opinion to the contrary, no matter if it’s my own opinion, but even at his most outspoken he’s never been vindictive or cruel and I’ve never felt threatened by him. Not even now. I was scared at first and I still am, but not of him. Despite everything that’s happened, nothing about him as a person has changed and I don’t see any reason why it should.”

“You need to understand what you’re up against. You’re playing with an unhealthy dynamic,” Jorin says. “He has a greater possibility of doing harm now than he ever did as a human. Give him a chance and he will.”

“I’ve given him the past six years of my life and I’m fine.”

“Maybe six years was enough to make you a convenience to be tolerated until he could find something else. Something better. What could be better than immortality and the promise of having every unspoken wish fulfilled?”

“That’s not how Dan is.”

The answer is confident and assured, just as most of his answers tended to be when they had anything to do with Dan, but it doesn’t stop a tiny flare of impatience from needling him as he says it. It was difficult to convince someone with deeply ingrained preconceptions to consider a different opinion than their own, but it had never stopped Phil from trying. He already had enough experience in the past with old friends and acquaintances who had freely expressed their skepticism about his new friendship with Dan at the time, citing all the things they’d thought were critical shortcomings that would only do Phil more harm than good in the long run, but their turn at well-meaning advice had always sounded more like they were holding Dan to the standards of an X Factor audition for personality traits where he was always expected to lose. “He’s too loud, too rude, too strange, too shallow, too annoying, too obnoxious,” and on and on in a constantly evolving stream of commentary meant to imply Dan was too much of everything they thought Phil shouldn’t like and not good enough to try. Only Phil’s persistence that Dan was more than good enough coupled with his constant refusal to push Dan away had made them finally concede to his perspective.

Maybe pointing out the real physical threat Dan currently posed was different than listing his supposed character flaws, but in some ways it wasn’t. The years he’d spent in Dan’s company had to count for something. Being as successful and content as they’d become together had to count for more. The capacity for monstrosity and harm wasn’t limited to creatures with fangs and although he’d received the sting of those fangs in his arm, could still feel the dull ache of their weight on the fresh scars on his skin, Phil remains certain that of all the things which defined a monster, Dan wasn’t one of them.

“You can’t condemn a person when you don’t know them at all,” he tells Jorin. “If we’re discussing unhealthy dynamics, judging someone based on remote possibilities and hearsay isn’t the best approach.”

Jorin groans and weakly holds up one hand in a mock warding gesture as if Phil’s presence were suddenly too much to look at, let alone conceive of. “No, no, no, you can’t possibly exist. How have you gone this long being as you are and not having been accosted by the worst society has to offer genuinely earnest and kind people like you? Most times they never make it through intact, but here you are like a bloody paradox, like some Lovecraftian impossibility built on genuine compassion instead of horror. You really do believe in what you say-more so, you believe in him and that makes it even worse.”

“Makes what worse?”

“You’re the type what believes in the best of a person at any given time, the same type who’s always taken advantage of because of it. The Night Court will turn him into a predator that’ll enjoy exploiting the weakness. You’ll become the delicacy of choice to whet his appetite. I know by experience-no hearts were ever richer and sweeter than those with hearts like yours.”

Phil remembers how Dan had described the taste of his blood as densely rich, better than chocolate or liquor, speaking with the contented drowsy pleasure of someone half drunk on fine food but willing to suffocate themselves with seconds if given the chance. At the time, Dan had restrained himself against another more deliberate fatal bite, but Jorin’s threat promises the Court might soon reconfigure his self-control into ravenous addiction that wouldn’t mind if the meal of choice ended up being his best friend.  
Jorin nods as if agreeing to every thought Phil leaves unspoken.

“The Court would throw elaborate fetes where the guests most often were the appetizers and the most sought after were always the kind ones, the ones who were clever and heartfelt like you. If there wasn’t enough to go around we’d squabble like a pack of dogs with one treat between them. The unspoken rule is you go after the mean ones, the vicious souls who enjoy the thrill of hurting others. You don’t touch those living according to the means of harmless ambitions, but the flavor was like comparing ambrosia to ashes. I don’t indulge anymore, but you never forget the taste.”

Jorin stares thoughtfully at the slim column of Phil’s wrist, at the soft shadow of veins disappearing under the skin and Phil glances away, uncomfortable at the idea of being sized up like a baked pastry for an impromptu taste test.

“Er-like I said, I’m not just going to assume Dan will do the same. He’s much stronger than you give him credit for.”

“ _Strength._ ” Jorin’s mouth stretches thin around his teeth as he spits the word like a jeer. “Don’t talk to me about strength, not when I’ve seen them snatch up the most strong willed new bloods, people who might have put up the best resistance to the Court and brought them to ruin if given the chance, become nothing but cheap lackeys drunk on blood, deceit and authority. This isn’t about strength. It’s about the way people are, the way they would all be if the proprieties and sanctions of social norms didn’t hinder them. None of these lot are any different.” He flicks a hand dismissively to the side to indicate the small crowd of customers and staff around them.

“Taverns are the best place to see what people are really like when they think no one’s watching. You don’t know half the things I’ve witnessed here since this place opened. Colleagues double crossing each other for a better paid position, pious charity workers accepting bribes to pocket more than the foundation they’re lobbying for, students swiping wallets to buy £80 trousers so no one will take the piss out of them even though they’re struggling to work double shifts at Sainsbury’s to afford to eat, conservative minded straight laced politicians meeting up for a bit of posh totty while their wives are out of town to convince themselves their libido hasn’t aged like they have, people getting their kicks smack talking friends and neighbors behind their backs when otherwise they’re all polite smiles to hide their derision because there’s a certain power in pretending you know more about someone than you really do. Nah, after all this time I’ve learned strength doesn’t mean anything except when it’s used to distinguish between the have’s and the have not’s. Soon, your friend will get the red carpet introduction of what’s it’s like to live like those who have it all or take it all by force.”

“I’ll tell you something else,” Jorin continues, “you don’t need to sit around taverns to know what people are really like, not when social media does the job for you. Everyone busy trying to curate a sense of self through images and words to reflect who they are when most times it’s just people putting on bad impressions of what they think strangers want to see, using false validation as an emotional crutch while playing a desperate numbers game to stay ahead of everyone else. Then you have those what feed on negativity like ravens scavenging a junk heap, provoking and criticizing behind false names, powerful in their anonymity like monsters hiding in the dark under the bed, feeding on every outraged reaction with the same ravenous appetite as a vampire. Doesn’t matter whether it’s here or online, it’s all about people trying to find a sense of purpose through imagining things they don’t have or abusing what power they do have to stroke their egos.”

Jorin’s voice steadily increases in volume as he goes, teeth bared like a grinning corpse. “The world is just a vicious food chain where strength only has meaning if you know how to manipulate every angle to your advantage. It’s all self-serving bullshit and why not? You have to be some degree of selfish to get ahead, but people get so far ahead they end up with their heads stuck up their arse and forget about everything else, including themselves. It’s a grade A shitshow-politics, finance, education, religion-everything. And it’s all because of people, all those shifty, wanky, single-minded, knobheaded, cun-”

“Aright, man. Keep your hair on.” Teague cuts him off quickly as heads turn once more to eye their table.

Jorin deflates visibly, shoulders sagged forward at an oblique angle as the hot air of his tirade finally gives out.

“People,” he mutters. “It’s all bad business.”

He says nothing more after that and stares vacantly ahead as if he needed to mentally recuperate after expending so much energy to talk when he’d gone years without an audience who’d willingly stick around to listen. Perhaps this was the first time anyone had. As harsh as it was to think so, Phil’s beginning to understand why the bartender’s assessment of Jorin as a ‘Billy no mates’ might be true. It was difficult to hold a conversation where every comment was answered with a counterargument entailing a bleak worldview where everyone shared equal culpability of being as terrible and irredeemable as the Court itself. Even Teague’s earlier description of Jorin as a cynic of Shakespearean proportions seems like a serious understatement in hindsight. Whatever ability Jorin might have once had to think objectively seems to have been lost somewhere between his harsh tutelage in the Court and his slippery perspective of a London too alien and monstrous in its modernity for him to readily embrace. What’s left is a disillusionment so deeply ingrained it curves Jorin’s spine into a perpetual slouch and twists his face into a bitter scowl as he speaks, making him a dead ringer for any hulking gargoyle decorating a cathedral’s parapets. Instead of inspiring the idea for the fictional Jaques as Teague had suggested, maybe Jorin was the forerunner of the school of thought behind philosophical pessimism before Schopenhauer had written about it. He’s so certain of the futility of human nature Phil’s not sure there’s any grain of equitable optimism left to be reasoned with to convince him otherwise. Only a thin margin of difference separates him from the doomsday preacher Phil remembers leaving behind in Manchester, a frenetic eyed man with a hardback bible and the self-employed mission of shouting at all passerby within earshot about the guaranteed damnation of every living soul with an internet connection. Jorin’s purpose however is not one of salvation, so much as it is a cautionary argument detailing why going after Dan was risky, impossible and pointless. But even if there was some truth to the sharp edged cynicism in Jorin’s words to support humanity’s bleak potential for malice and stupidity, through his own experience and Dan’s example of a personality driven by the antithesis of everything Jorin despised, Phil has never been more convinced that not only is there some hope to be invested in the world and the people living in it, but fighting to get Dan back, to be with him, to believe in him despite the risky, impossible nature of what they now faced, isn’t pointless at all. It’s profoundly important.

“It’s not all bad, you know,” he gently suggests. “I know sometimes it’s hard to think so and I know you’ve probably seen enough of the worst in people that it’s difficult not to generalize everyone the same way, but there’s more to it than that-even when sometimes I imagine what it might be like to leave the planet completely and find someplace better or make a better world on my own. But I think…I think sometimes, when things are bad, it’s possible to stay exactly where you are and make something good for yourself and find good people who want to do the same along with you.”

Jorin’s vacant gaze refocuses, but he remains silent and dour faced.

“Social media, the internet in general, is the same way. Maybe when you say people are trying to be something other than they are, they’re just trying to find themselves or find what has meaning for them personally,” Phil continues. “There’s more going on with people than we see, here and especially online. I remember listening to someone say that ‘social media is an opportunity to reflect your own personality and change it whenever you like, not constrained by your own anxieties and phobias and fears. You can live on the Internet. Do what you want. Inhabit the spaces which you feel comfortable in and express yourself and your identity however you wish.’”

The off kilter energy of frustration lurking around Jorin’s low slung posture palpably eases into one of quiet reflection as he considers Phil in reflective silence.

“The person you remember listening to…” he asks slowly. “Who was it?”

Phil pauses for a moment and smiles. “It was Dan. He was the one who said that. And I believe him. I believe trying to find meaning, accomplishing something in order to find comfort and happiness, means more than all the bad examples ever will. If I didn’t believe that I probably wouldn’t do YouTube anymore.”

“YouTube, is it?” Jorin squints. “You one of those uploading their washing machine cycles?”

“I-what? No, no, of course not,” Phil says in a rush, aware the hurried denial only makes him sound guiltier than intended.

“Always figured YouTube for the worst of the lot, right on par with the Court. Thought it was an interesting venture when I first started watching it, like some new version of the Globe where anyone could write and star in their own productions for the world to see free of charge. But it was the same shady deal under a different name, where one had to lease all creative expression to an anonymous conglomerate with the power to make or break you at the whim of whatever they think best serves their bottom line. Never understood the appeal of it or the hassle of having to wonder if after making a name for yourself you’d end up being the featured topic in a video hosted by someone eager to give their unsolicited opinion about people they don’t know anything about, because whether it’s online, on Jeremy Kyle or in the Court, the business of being petty is a lucrative one. To me, it sounds like the kind of workplace vile for the mind, but you chose to do it anyway.”

“I guess I just found the right friends to be with so the worst comments never mattered as much.” He shrugs. “YouTube isn’t perfect, but getting to be my own editor, producer and director seemed more rewarding than toughing out a shift in chain stores while hoping someone in the industry might give my film degree a chance. This way, I get to make my own chances. Which…makes me sound a bit of a shill considering it’s where I work, but I’m honestly happy with the decision I made. I don’t regret it.”

"I suppose it’s not a bad alternative considering no matter where one works or goes there’s always some man behind the curtain to be leery of. Hard not to be paranoid when manipulation was a work ethic the Court drilled into me early on. Now I see ghosts where there are none.” Jorin idly pushes the broken glass around the table, arranging and then rearranging them into abstract configurations like a dangerous jigsaw puzzle. “Never could find a way to make my own chances for myself. I was too scared at first to make any decisions of my own so I left it up to the Court to decide and it was good for a time until it wasn’t anymore. When you let someone else decide how to live your life, eventually you forget how to live for yourself, until you’re just one more means to an end for someone else’s ambitions.”

He flicks a finger at one large, crooked shard of glass and it flies across the woodtop to collide at great speed with the makeshift mosaic he’d made, scattering the pieces like an expert break shot on a pool table.  
“I’ll leave the lighthearted optimism to humans like you who haven’t had time or circumstance enough to convince them the world is anything less than a bad cosmic joke. The way I see it, the era may be different and the technology flashier, but people are the same as they ever were centuries ago when we held our noses past rotting midden heaps at the corner of town and paused to talk about the latest to do with the aristocracy, saying what we wouldn’t give to be in their shoes and not with the rest of the poor sods muddling about with dirt on our noses; talking about what we wouldn’t give to be different, to have a bit of influence, to be as unrestrained and uncensored as we liked, always thinking maybe murder, slander and treachery weren’t hefty prices to pay for a bit of lucrative real estate, social prestige and a six figure bank roll. No matter how much the world changes people will always be the same, they just find ways to hide their worst thoughts and ambitions until they’re given an incentive not to.”

“That’s not true.” Phil immediately demurs. “Not completely. I mean, not to say there isn’t plenty of instances to speak of for cruelty or spitefulness, not when it’s always a feature on the news, but it’s unfair to think everyone is like that or to think that’s all the world has ever amounted to throughout history.”

“I suppose there _are_ rare occasions when someone breaks the mold.” Jorin studies him with artless intrigue. “There’s you for a start, with genuine conviction and loyalty of Captain America proportions. It doesn’t matter what I or anyone says, does it? You’d continue to believe in your friend even if he came back to finish the job he started on your arm.”

“I believe in him because that’s not how he is.”

“That’s not how he is or that’s just what you want to believe?”

Phil looks away towards the rain dappled shadows falling across the table and wonders.

“Both,” he says quietly.

“Look, I’m not an altruist. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I was. I’ve done worse than I’ll ever admit to behind closed doors or in public, but even I don’t like the idea of you, kind fool that you are, being strung up by the Court as their plaything. I’m not trying to do anything other than pull off those rose tinted glasses before you make a choice you regret.”

“I may not have the best eyesight,” Phil says, “in fact it’s fairly terrible, but when it comes to Dan I see just fine.When I said I didn't regret anything, I didn't only mean about my job, I meant about him too.”

“Christ, you really are stubborn aren’t you? I’d chalk it up to Northern bred disposition, but I think it’s just who you are. Of course, I’m one to talk aren’t I?” Jorin taps the table with strained forbearance as he considers approaching the conversation from a different angle. “Fine then. For the sake of your trust in him, let’s say Dan is one of those few who dig in their heels and rejects every ‘gift’ offered. The Night Court would only persist until he gives in, which he will and why wouldn’t he? Opposition just leads to the Court ruining the lives of everyone he once knew, until the novelty grows old and he’s the last to be disposed of once he’s been stripped of everything that once held meaning. If he cares for you as much as you do about him, he won’t allow you to be their bargaining chip. It’ll be easier to start a new life away from you, where you won’t be dragged into a conflict you as a human can never walk away from. Teague told you his experience, but maybe he didn’t get the message across. I was equal victim and perpetrator of their mind games. I know what they’re capable of. There’s nothing you can do to help him and nothing you could offer him better than what the Court will. Best you run along home, put the kettle on and thank whatever god you like best that they took him instead of you. Get it through that pretty head-Dan is as good as gone and there’s nothing you can do about it, one way or the other.”

“No.”

Jorin startles. “Sorry?”

“No, I’m not going back without him. Which I guess also makes me the type of person who learns better by experience; not listening to what a stranger tells me I can’t do when I’m already committed to the idea.” Phil speaks in a subdued tone that despite its amiable nature still manages to be powerful and unyielding in its sincerity. “Maybe he’ll hold his own or maybe he’ll change and want to stay like you said, but I’ll find out for myself when I get there. One way or the other.”

“…And they call me mad,” Jorin mutters wonderingly.

A pall of heavy silence falls across the table again, tempered this time by Teague’s uncomfortable shuffling as Jorin looks on, perplexed by Phil’s adamant refusal to walk away. He opens his mouth, presumably with another bid at trying to change Phil’s mind, but anything he might think to say next is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a waitress intent on mopping up the spill of beer on the table with the tea towel and tray she carries in hand.

“Oh, this looks dangerous. Alright if I clear this up for you?”

At the collective mumbles of assent she busies herself with delicately gathering up the shards of glass onto the tray. “Strange. Never seen one of these break like that before. Had a whole cart of them go over in the kitchen once and they’re so densely made they just bounced off the floor without so much as a crack. First time for everything I suppose. Can I get you a round of the same or would you all like to order something else?”

Phil blinks and nearly orders a drink he already knows will go untouched out of the same self-conscious guilt that motivated him to buy something as small and inconsequential as a Kinder Egg when going through a shop so as not to feel as if he were wasting the staff’s time. It was a habit Dan regularly exasperated over, telling him visiting a store didn’t necessarily obligate one to buy anything if they didn’t have to, but Phil could never help it. Somehow it felt vaguely impolite not to buy something, even when in the middle of a fervent debate about the merits of risking his life to find Dan. However, before he can blurt out an order on impulse, Jorin reaches out and touches the woman’s wrist, pulling her closer with the confidential air of someone about to whisper a secret.

“We’re not ordering anything else tonight, love. We’re just having a little get together, an informal tête-à-tête, but with three instead of two. It won’t be for much longer, but in the meantime, while we’re here, how about you get the word out that no one else is to approach this table. Not servers or managers or the entire cast of Coronation Street. Do you understand?” He trains his wide-eyed red rimmed stare on her, his finger running a slow path down the middle of her palm as he speaks and the woman smiles with a faint, half dazed expression somewhere between pleasure and a drunken stupor.

“I…understand. No one else will approach the table while you’re here.”

“We’re conducting important business. Top secret confidential matters what need complete privacy.”

“Complete….privacy. Of course.”

“There’s a dear. Off you pop then.” Jorin lets her go and the woman straightens up slowly with the same dreamy look before turning around with her tea towel and tray to make her way back down the aisle away from their table.

“That was glamour- what you did just now to make her leave,” Phil says. “Or that’s what Dan called it.”

“It’s one name for it. Teague likes to call it the ‘mindfuck’ which is crude, but not so far off the mark for what it is. You reach in to someone’s thoughts, play around and don’t even have the courtesy to ask them out to dinner afterwards.” Jorin smirks. “Not quite mind control, none of us can do that. More like you plant a suggestion too compelling to say no to. In the Court they teach you how to effectively use it on others until you can convince them to do most anything. Could probably make them re-enact Punch and Judy to the letter like a macabre snuff film with enough practice. In fact, knowing the Court, I’m sure it’s probably been tried at some point.”

Phil remembers the loose sensation of easy complacency that had fallen over him when Ashton had lured him into the alley with nothing but a simple word of invitation turned powerful suggestion, dulling his better judgment to take advantage of his disarrayed emotions at the time and make him an easy mark for Ashton’s hunger.

_If Dan hadn’t arrived when he had…_

If Dan hadn’t arrived, he thinks, he’d have probably stood there with the same blissful smile on his face as the waitress, oblivious to the fangs poised to kill him. A shiver of disgust runs up his spine at the idea.

Jorin notices and his eyebrows raise. “Oh, you seem familiar with it. Do tell. Has Dan tried it out on you? Made you quack like a duck yet?”

“I-um-no? What?”

“That’s what I did my first time blundering into it. Still remember it to this day. Hard not to really. It was the medieval ages. I’d been celebrating the Feast of Fools with a group of goliards-” at Phil’s blank expression, Jorin clarifies further. “Traveling bards of a sort associated with the clergy who wrote satirical prose about the seamier side of church governance and set it to song-essentially what the kids call a ‘roast’ these days. They were singing this one verse. An allegory about martyrdom I think. Some controversial piece about a swan what got cooked? How did it go again? Had it stuck in my head the other day.”

He abruptly hums a tune while waving the index fingers of his hands like a conductor’s baton and looks over at Teague with the expectation for him to fill in the gaps with words, but Teague merely shrugs.

“Sorry, no clue. I think that’s well before my time.”

“Ah, yes, yes, it was, wasn’t it? I keep forgetting. When you’re one of the few people left alive from an era that’s been lost to the past for centuries no one ever knows what you’re on about. Which would be true anyway, but you know how it goes. Some references have a shelf life and all of mine are well past their date of expiry.” Jorin lets his hands fall back onto the table with a crestfallen thump.

“Doesn’t matter either way to the anecdote. It was just me, the budding new blood, mingling with a bunch of clerics and friars all in their cups having a go at church philosophies and I thought it would be funny to join in. You know, a supposed cursed creature of God critiquing His appointed human leaders right on church grounds with the rest of the revelers? The height of poetic irony. Long story short, after I thought one of the singers sounded like a mallard with a stomachache, I commented on it and somehow ended up convincing an entire troupe of goliards to quack their verses for twenty minutes straight before I figured out how to make them stop. Quite a show really. Pity it was never recorded in history. Could have called it the ‘quackening.’” Jorin looks off into the distance sadly.

“Er, Dan hasn’t tried it on me, not for animal impressions or otherwise,” Phil says. “I don’t think he ever would try it. Well...maybe just to stop me sneaking sweets meant for house guests and not leaving socks on his bedroom floor, but never for anything exploitative.”

“The way you shuddered however-you know what the feeling of being under is like. If he didn’t introduce you to the wonderful world of dubious hypnosis, who did?”

“Another vampire. He’s apparently a steward of the Court. Ashton.”

Jorin abruptly stills.

“You…were targeted by Ashton, once proud brigadier turned official brown noser of the Court, and survived to talk about it?”

“Only because of Dan. He got to me before anything could happen and fought Ashton off until he left."

Jorin gives another choking wheezing laugh. “Now that’s a fine picture. I’d have paid to see the look on Ashton’s face to know he’d been one-upped by a new blood. Must have been a nasty turn for him.”

The grating rattle of his laughter dies away and he shakes his head in a slow, musing fashion. “You know, maybe you’re right, maybe I haven’t given your friend enough credit.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Dan’s always been more than meets the eye.”

An explosive flash of lightning illuminates the darkness behind the windows and in the ensuing cannon blast of thunder which follows the lights blinker with a droning electrical buzz, setting off a ripple of stifled gasps and uneasy laughter around the room.

“I’d say that’s our cue to speed this up. If you’re ever planning on helping us, Jorin, now’s the time,” Teague says. “We don’t have the luxury to sit here and swap details to try and convince you. The short of it is-Yilmaz is Dan’s sire. She did a bunk straight after turning him, left Dan to his own devices and he later finds the wherewithal to not only weather the thirst, but also defend Phil here from Ashton of all people resulting in the Court taking a special interest.”

“Special interest isn’t the word. This one says Dan fought off one of the Court’s stewards, then you tell me he’s Yilmaz’s own? Fuck me, you can’t just gloss over a detail like that.” Jorin fidgets and glances over his shoulder, checking for idle eavesdroppers or perhaps Yilmaz herself. “I suppose you both have an ingenious plan up your sleeves to break him out because that’s not a prize the Court will easily part with.”

“We…didn’t have much of a plan other than just finding him and figuring the rest out in the moment,” Phil admits meekly.

“Figure out what? That you’re in over your head? Bit off more than you can chew? Completely powerless to do anything? Even if I took you aside, corralled you in a dark corner where no one could see and turned you, stopped that sloshing beating heart and replaced every drop of your blood with mine, gave you the crash course to make that stubborn courage of yours into an indomitable force fueled by blood lust and unspeakable strength, you still wouldn’t have the power to face the Court.”

“So I keep being told.” Phil closes his eyes against another withering flare of impatience strong enough to set off the tension collecting along his temples into a grinding headache and sighs. “I’m not asking to be made into anything other than who and what I am right now. I’m still trying to cope with everything else to think about becoming something different and I’m not sure I’d want to change at all. I know my strengths and weaknesses. I know I’m only human, but that doesn’t mean I can’t affect anything. It doesn’t mean I’m not still going to try.”

Jorin looks over at Teague incredulously. “And you’re going along with this mission of certain disaster? Have you gone barmy too?"

“Maybe, but I made a promise and I’m not one to go back on it. Besides, when I stood up to the Court, I had to go it alone and we all know how that turned out. I figure he has a better chance if I’m with him.”

“If I remember correctly, you weren’t alone at all. In fact, wasn’t Yilmaz with you-”

“No.” The word flies across the table like a vicious epithet, louder than the rain rattling the windows. Phil recoils from the unexpected force behind it, startled at how one simple word could carry such a clear venomous threat. Teague’s face matches his tone, once more lapsing into the haggard severity of an ancient feral creature, the closest Phil thinks he might ever come to resembling the wrinkle snarled vampires on Buffy.

“It was a mistake, one I don’t want to talk about. It’s old news anyway, the bad kind when it has anything to do with her. Leave it.”

“I didn’t want to talk about the Court, but look at me now, airing my private distaste and self-loathing for a stranger to hear because he can’t take no for an answer and I’m too starved for company to make you both leave when I should have. But fine-” Jorin gives a dismissive wave. “I’ll say no more. Given your experience though, I’d expect you to know better than anyone how dangerous it is to cross her. You know what she’s like when someone tries to interfere with what’s ‘hers.’ I’m surprised you’ve still agreed to go along with this.”

“Dan’s her new blood. Phil isn’t. It’s a small loophole, but substantial enough to not be a problem. Not sure I’d care even if it was. Already said I’m with him through the worst of this.” Teague nods over at Phil. “That’s the extent of our plan and I’d say it’s enough to be going on with if you could just get on with telling us where the Court is.”

Jorin looks between them for a moment, assessing. “You two…I thought I’d seen everything of the world and human nature and I wasn’t sure there was anything else worth the price of immortality to stick around and see, but apparently I was wrong. It’s a good feeling, to be honest with you. Nice to know I can still be surprised.”

The lights overhead dim and flicker in the wake of another volley of thunder. When they steady Jorin falls back to mute brooding and Phil tries not to hold his breath while waiting to hear the ultimate verdict on whether or not being pleasantly surprised equated to Jorin relinquishing the information they needed. Seconds pass but in Phil’s mind they stretch to hours. Someone coughs, a fork clatters down onto a plate, the radio churns out another queue of songs and the storm overhead trundles along in a whirring rumble of light and noise without end. Everything proceeds in an agonizingly slow montage of cursory details, heedless of Phil’s anxious wait for what at the moment is the most important answer of his life. Another moment of tense silence and Phil’s overcome with the same restless tension of strung out evenings when he was too jetlagged and alert to fall asleep, when his brain wouldn’t stop offering an endless string of idle thoughts for his consideration, only now every thought hinges on wondering where Dan was and what might be happening to him every minute he was in the Court’s care. Then, just as Phil’s endurance quivers to the edge of implosion-

“Fine. You want to know where they are, so be it.” Jorin throws up his hands like a flag of surrender. “Cassandra affliction, just like I said. I warn and warn and warn and no one ever listens, but here’s hoping I’m wrong about the outcome this time around.”

“That makes both of us,” Phil says, relieved to think they might finally be on their way. “And thank you.”

“Don’t go thanking me. I’m throwing you to the wolves not sending you on a holiday. This week the wolves in question are holed up in a monolith of a mansion in Totteridge, right on the common, tucked away into the woods. Bucolic scenery and long shadows as far as the eye can see. Never think you were only ten miles from central London. It’s hoity-toityville to be sure. Think Mayfair, but greener.”

“Totteridge…” Teague’s brow furrows. “I know which house you’re talking about. Always heard it was as near to a fortress as you could get without it being an actual armory.”

“It’s where they hold the most lavish parties and where they take you when they don’t want the neighbors to hear what’s going on," Jorin says. "It’s also the perfect setting to ‘play’ with their new acquisition. He’s probably already turning into the driveway as we speak. They’ll take some time introducing and preening him for the main event, so if you mean to catch up with him before they begin, I’d be on my way.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Thanks.” Teague stands up at once and Phil slides along the bench to follow after him. “Listen, next time I’m around, we’ll catch up. None of this showing up just to ask a favour.”

“Save it for _if_   you come back. You come along too.” He nods at Phil. “You could try the stewed cheese dessert. It’s the signature dish here, or so I’ve heard-one of those long standing culinary traditions about as old as their custom of placing bets on weighing blocks of cheese.”

“I-er-think I might pass on the dessert,” Phil says, too put off at the mental image of a bubbling pot filled with sour melted cheese to question how weighing oversized blocks of the stuff could possibly become a long standing tradition.

Jorin shrugs. “Their roast dinners are the true main event anyway, not that I’ve ever had occasion to try it for myself, but it’s the general talk of the room most nights. Also, a more relevant word of advice about your destination? When you arrive, don’t expect to be getting in the front door. They’ll have security to the nines, but it’s not foolproof. There’s an old service road- an overgrown flinty lane what leads to a culvert. Inside is an old remnant of a cave system that was dug out centuries ago. London’s full of them. Some are manmade, others not. I don’t know what the story is behind this particular one, only that it runs under the house and comes out in the area of the cellar they use for storage.”

“Sounds great,” Teague says. “But what’s to say the others don’t know about it too?”

“Probably because I only became aware of it one night after their little parties when I stumbled through a hatch drunk on Macallan M laced blood. I was floating along on a heavenly buzz nice as you please and next thing I know I’m ankle deep in the drink. Don’t know if it was a leftover smuggler operation or a bygone mining expedition, but the Court didn’t know it was there and for reasons I can’t explain I never told them. Just closed it up the way it was before I found it, shoved some of their stored antiques over it, covered the lot with white sheets and forgot about it until now. Should still be in the same condition as they never bother with most of the junk down there. You need a sure way in, that’s your ticket.”

“Wading through backed up water in an underground cave. Not quite Ocean’s Eleven, but better than having no plan of entry at all.” Teague squeezes Jorin’s shoulder, a brief discreet signal of their departure. “Thank you for this. Truly.”

Jorin gives a noncommittal grunt and looks away towards Phil. “You…take care of yourself. If you survive this, I’d say the rest of your life is geared to be a remarkable one.”  
“It’s more than a bit remarkable already actually.” Phil smiles and then hesitates, sensing another more physical gesture of appreciation was needed, almost expected, from the way Jorin leans forward with one arm subtly raised at his side, prepared to offer a handshake if Phil would accept

_I’ve come this far and he hasn’t killed either of us yet. Why not?_

In his mind he can almost hear Dan’s choked exasperation at wanting to shake hands with the vampire who had moments ago nearly crushed his arm, but it seemed only right to do so, to give a formal show of trust and appreciation that would also serve to demonstrate his resolve hadn’t changed an inch from when he’d first walked in.

He reaches forward, right hand outstretched for the frigid clasp Jorin offers and finds it no different than Teague’s had been, full of untold power and deliberate care. This time there’s no violent squeeze to herald imminent amputation, but Jorin holds on for longer than a traditional handshake would demand. It’s another kind of test Phil quickly understands from the way Jorin’s rheumy eyes narrow, clinical and gleaning, as if he were measuring the pulse through Phil’s palm, searching each beat for a message only he could understand like a new kind of divination.

“You have his mark on you. It’s strong,” Jorin mutters. “The others usually wouldn’t bother with you, not with that scent. It’s like citronella to mosquitos. But as you’re going into the mouth of the beast uninvited, all bets are off as they say. Once they know who you are and why you’re there, they’ll come for you, mark or not.”

His fingers press into the soft pad of skin between Phil’s index and middle fingers, calculating silently.

“A human risking his life for a new blood... If anyone had mentioned the possibility before I’d have said it was impossible, but who’d have thought Yilmaz would turn someone after all this time? Or that he’d later drive off a steward and survive? I suppose, as that waitress said, there’s a first time for everything.”

The fingers readjust, pressing the deeply indented slope of the life line etched into Phil’s palm, following its trajectory from left to right and back again. “Maybe…this time…you two might just be the unprecedented surprise needed to make the Court fall. They’ve prepared for every eventuality. External coups, internal dissension, police inquiries, intelligence hacks-they leave nothing to chance. It’s partly why every attempt against them fails, but I don’t think they’re prepared for either of you.”

His fingers flex rigid and strong, seizing Phil in a restrained grip meant to hold his attention; to make sure he listened to every word.

“As strong as that mark is, _you_ are stronger. I don’t think you understand half the power you have, but I don’t think it’s necessary that you do. You’re like any true warrior who moves by self-assured instinct and compassion, the kind of forces no one truly comprehends except in the heat of the moment. These come naturally to you. They’re your sword and shield and you wield them well. Don’t doubt them for a second. If any of that lot try something with you-and they will-if they try something along the lines of not so subliminal suggestion, you can fight it. There are mental cues you can learn so they’d never be able to try in the first place, makeshift barriers of the mind you can construct through meditation and practiced force of will to keep them out, but it takes time you don’t have.”

“What-can I do then? You said I could fight it, but what do I use?”

Jorin reaches up with his free hand and gently taps the side of Phil’s temple and then, with the same gentle command for attention, traces a slow downward path to hone in on the middle of Phil’s chest. He lingers there, pressing with careful deliberate weight to indicate not the physical presence of the heart beating fast beneath the skin, but the metaphysical suggestion of Phil’s soul, of his very character, of every principle and belief which powered the individuality behind the person known only as Phil Lester.

“Remember yourself. Remember the conviction that refused to listen to me and use it to resist if they try to convince you of something you don’t want to do or try to tell you something you don’t believe. Remember yourself. It’s all you need to fight back.”

He lets Phil’s hand slip from his grasp and abruptly turns back to the window as his posture collapses once more to sullen and withdrawn. “Now get out, the both of you. The storm is growing and I’d like not to have to think anymore.”

With their welcome at an end, Teague gently prods Phil down the aisle, steering him back towards the exit before Jorin can lose whatever dregs of patience he had left. The bartender never notices when they leave the Grill Room. The only customer seated at the bar despondently nurses a pint of lager in silence as the radio dj announces the time and weather in a tone that suggests he’d like to be braving the storm in the comfort of his own home rather than in a studio’s on-air booth. Their footfalls resound in hollow echoes across the creaking wood as they approach the door to leave, but the bartender never so much as glances up. Phil wonders if maybe it’s evidence of Jorin’s command to the waitress at work, so that none of the staff would pay them any mind until they left for good, a tenuous courtesy of invisibility which apparently doesn’t extend to the tavern’s patrons as the man at the bar gives them a cursory disinterested glance before returning to his drink. If the true potential of ‘glamour’ was so powerful it could compel the waitress to pass along Jorin’s command like a spreading forest fire so that every employee she spoke with in turn fell under the thrall of a single suggestion, Phil wonders how ‘remembering himself’ could possibly be enough of a defense to counter it.

 _I guess I’ll find out_ , he thinks.

As Teague yanks his hood back into place, Phil lingers for a moment to stare back at the hunched shadow seated at the table they’d left behind.

“Will he be okay?”

Teague pauses in the middle of fidgeting with the corners of his hood and glances over into the Grill Room. “Jorin? He’s a tough one. There’s someone who’s taken his share of hard hits through the years and keeps on standing. He’s lonely and disillusioned, like most of us really, and he worries more than he lets on, but he’ll be alright.”

In the awkward gap of silence which follows, Phil understands they’re both not entirely convinced.

Phil has more questions he means to ask, not the least of which include the need for Teague to explain how he could have asked Yilmaz for help all those years ago, but his ferocious reaction towards Jorin before and the deadline hanging over their heads leads Phil to think it was a question perhaps better left for another time and place.  
Instead he settles for asking, “what did he mean by Cassandra affliction?”

“Say again?”

“Cassandra affliction-when he said he warns and warns and no one ever listens?”

“Oh that.” Teague sighs. “Jorin’s an old classic who loves the older classics. Everything of Greek and Roman antiquity is his purview. You’d think he was alive for half that era the way he goes on about it sometimes. Cassandra was an oracle devoted to the god Apollo. Story goes she insulted him or deceived him or both-I don’t know. The gods in those stories always had tetchy tempers for any number of reasons. Apollo cursed her so that no one would ever believe her prophecies. She’d foretell tragedies and disasters, warn against destruction and war, but no one listened. The way I hear it, Apollo always had a penchant for being a nasty piece of work when provoked. I suppose he found a kinship with the story because when Jorin left the Court they derided and discredited him to the point no one really takes him seriously anymore, just like Cassandra with Apollo.”

Apollo…

 _Beware._ The old warning springs back to mind like a blaring siren more insistent than ever. _Beware…beware…_

What were the odds then? One mention in his dream and now again while awake. He might have chalked it up to coincidence, but given the circumstances it seems more like an uneasy premonition, the kind of sixth sense minded intuition his grandmother had once been rumored to have. The more he thinks of his own small experiences with tarot cards and split second decisions which had become fateful opportunities better than simple coincidence, the more he wonders if maybe there was something to the warning, one he’s willfully ignoring because it was easier to believe in vampires than in ill-fated omens. Easier to believe Dan wouldn’t become the worst of everything his nature dictated he was.

_Or maybe it doesn’t mean anything. It was just a random phrase rattling around my head without context when I woke up and now it’s playing on an idle comment Jorin said to make it seem like more than it really is. It’s just a subconscious fear, not a cosmic warning. If I listened to every bad dream or insecurity that popped into my head I’d never leave the house at all._

He doesn’t pause to reconsider how the nightmare on the train had come true after a fashion, with Dan seizing his arm in a powerful bite, eyes drowned to pits of darkness and hunger, so far gone in the pleasured thrill of the moment he’d nearly lost himself and Phil in the process.

In dreams, sometimes a cigar was just a cigar and sometimes the monster in the shadows wore the face and name of the friend you loved.

“You alright?”

Phil startles back to himself and looks away from the lonely figure in the back of the Grill Room to notice Teague peering up at him with guileless concern.

“You look a bit green around the gills and we haven’t even gotten to the car yet.”

“Bad thoughts,” Phil murmurs.

“Yeah, you and me both. Hard not to on a night like this, what with the circumstances, but we know where they’ve taken Dan and like I said before, no matter what happens, you’re not alone in this. I may not be much…but I’m here for you.” Teague shrugs, head bowed, hands shoved deep in his pockets with an air of selfconcious embarrassment.

“You’re plenty. I’m glad you’re here.” Phil’s tone is firm, the answer immediate and true, with a world more of appreciation behind it and Teague’s head whips up to stare at him with an expression that too much resembles the wondering quiet look on Dan’s face when Phil offered a sincere word of praise. It makes Dan’s absence register more palpably and as thankful as Phil is for Teague’s presence he can’t help wishing Dan was stood there in his place instead. It’s a small pang of regret which disappears as quickly as it surfaces, brought on by the overwhelming need to have this entire business done and over with. Teague must note something of that wish reflected in his face, perhaps in the unconscious narrowing of his eyes against the dull throb of a tension headache still announcing its presence like a second heartbeat behind his skull, dialing up his nerves to an electrified state of constant alarm, because Teague quickly recovers from the emotional pause and nods towards the door.

“Right,” he says. “Time to bring Dan back home.”

There’s no question this time over whether they could pull off such an achievement. Phil understands the moment for worrying and debating reasonable plausibilities is over. Either they would do this or they wouldn’t, just as he would soon find out if the cryptic warning of his nightmare meant nothing or if it would end up meaning everything by the time the night was through.

In the end, as he follows Teague back out into the cold gush and bluster of the storm, Phil decides it best to take after Jorin’s parting words and not think about it anymore.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been another long while between updates, I know. A lot of things have come up since the last chapter I posted, most of it to do with family and personal health issues that have kept me from working on this and finishing it as quickly as I'd wanted to. Because I've decided I would actually like to finish it, even with my own personal misgivings about it in the past. I've committed to it this far and I've made small peace with the idea that in the end this story is not meant to be taken seriously as either personal commentary or an insult to the people it depicts. It's just something that I hope turns out to be entertaining, thoughtful and interesting for those who'd care to read it.
> 
> I was going to upload both parts at once as these would be the last two chapters to finish off the story, but part 2 is still being worked on and with the way things are going lately I wanted to at least post the first part to keep from taking even more time in updating. As it is, Part 2 shouldn't take much longer to be uploaded here. I really don't want this to stretch out into the new year, so with luck, if I'm able to, I'm aiming to have everything wrapped up by the end of December.
> 
> Again, a sincere thank you to new and returning readers for sticking with me to this point. Reading your comments and enthusiasm over each chapter has been a big source of encouragement for me, especially through some of the rougher patches I've had over the past few months.  
> Thank you for investing your time in reading this fic. As always, I hope this current chapter proved worth the wait.
> 
>    
> Notes on the story: 
> 
> * Ferula Gemini was the name of a staff wielded by a demon in an episode of Buffy when it was used against Xander accidentally, with mostly hilarious results. It had the power to divide a person's physical and spiritual being into their strong and weak halves or more specifically according to the wiki: "The Ferula Gemini fired bolts of energy that physically split the personalities of any being that they hit into two separate entities, one with the strong qualities and one with the weak qualities." As the theme of the chapter deals with discussing strong vs. weak attributes and how Dan and Phil determine for themselves what their greatest strengths are I thought the title was appropriate.
> 
> * The song which plays in the car with Eris and Dan is 'Body and Blood' by clipping. The song Phil hears in Simpson's is called, "You and Me," by Penny and the Quarters.
> 
> * I feel like I should point out neither Jorin's or Eris's comments and worldviews reflect my own. I kept going back and forth between deciding if I made them too intense in their approaches or not enough, only for the sake of conveying a sense of conflict and tension and establishing the extent of Dan and Phil's conviction towards each other in the context of the story. As well as touch on their own dedicated refusal to allow anyone to dictate who they are or influence the decisions they make. (either way, I'm still not sure if the tone came off more 'preachy' than intended or if it just fell flat...)
> 
> * Simpson's Tavern in Cornhill does exist although it closes much earlier than I wrote in the story, typically shutting its doors around 3:30 pm and probably not remaining open at all in the middle of a hurricane like storm. It's a historical landmark and one of the oldest taverns in London and apparently at one time bets really were placed on guessing the weight of blocks of cheese here.
> 
> * you: Pepe  
> Eris, an intellectual: some odd manner of frog


	9. Ferula Gemini Part II

 

 

_I have forgotten all my learning,_  
_but from knowing you_  
_I have become a scholar._  
_I have lost all my strength,_  
_but from your power_  
_I am able._

\- Rumi

 

There’s a word for everything. No part of the human experience-thoughts, actions, feelings; every lingering detail of what it means to exist as something sentient- is without a phrase or word to describe it, reflective perhaps of the long standing tradition of humanity’s effort to quantify the immeasurable and express the inexpressible. A habit borne from the irrepressible need to categorize everything into concise definitions, to contextualize the world and give meaning where there was once none. It was possible, if one looked long enough, to find archaic disused phrases and borrowed linguistic quiddities from around the world to define an array of fleeting sensations and abstract concepts. L’appel du vide, al garete, weltschmerz, sonder, gnossienne, occhiolism, litost, schadenfraude. These words and more tick their way through Dan’s mind, unfurling themselves for his consideration. He searches the list methodically for the one which might best help internalize the chaos of his current dilemma, but when he comes up short he wonders if in all the fancy overwrought psychobabble of sensorial lingo there was one succinct phrase to describe the feeling of trying to peacefully exist in his own head when every idle thought brought with it the constant reminder of his inevitable doom racing up to meet him, faster than the car barreling down the road, revealing layer upon layer of regrets, doubts and insecurities in its wake like a fatalistic nesting doll.

If it was true a person’s worst enemy was only themselves, then his subconscious is doing a passable job at turning him persona non grata, weighing him down with bad thoughts and worse suggestions he’d rather ignore. Trying not to think however only makes him think more. Trying to think of anything else but present circumstances makes the present all the more vivid. Trying to pretend he doesn’t care makes the deep seated frustration resurface with burning pressure along his jaw and around his fangs to remind him he does care. Too much and too deeply. The armrest in shambles at his side testifies as much. If pressed he would always answer he’d rather err on the side of sensitivity and empathetic compassion than become a stoic dispassionate hardass with a perpetual chip on his shoulders, but there were times like now when every word left a greater impression than he could assimilate calmly without agonizing over every implication, direct or unspoken, enough for him to pause and reconsider the benefits of being something akin to an emotional sponge oversoaked with too much stimuli for him to process all at once. If Phil were here he might advocate for a relaxing activity to soothe away unwanted grim introspections, anything to, as he might say, ‘get ‘The Look’ off your face.’ A look which, Dan had come to understand, consisted of intense, bristling stares, protracted silences and a grim downturn of his mouth, effectively communicating to anyone within his purlieu, “Danger, stay back 100 feet. Brooding in progress.” He can see himself in the window, brows drawn low over eyes darker than their usual warm brown, his face more serious and severe than he himself was comfortable with, but where Phil usually managed to coax him out of dwelling on things for longer than strictly healthy with little more than his presence alone, here there’s not much else to focus on other than the four confining steel walls of the car and the milling odor of death and flowers in the air. Every time Dan’s mind wanders off to indulge a distant memory or daydream in a small bid at distraction, the sharp tug of the ropes around his hands and the shattered arcs of lightning in the sky jar him back to the present, forcing him to confront the reality he’s trying to escape. It could just be his heightened senses once again magnifying the world to a hyper focused degree so that every detail screams at him to be awake, to be aware, but he’d rather do neither and instead slump down in his seat, close his eyes and take a siesta of rip van winkle proportions.

 _What would you call that sensation, when you want to escape yourself but you can’t,_ he thinks, _other than ‘utterly, royally screwed?’_

Ironic process theory. The explanation comes to him spontaneously, the idea that no matter how hard one tried not to think of a particular subject it would inevitably dominate center stage in one’s head, like an itch that would fester into an all-consuming need to scratch the longer one tried to suppress the urge. Not that he could help doing much of anything else when the prime instigator of his mood sat less than two feet away next to him, calmly picking through messages and links on her phone with a minute clatter of stiletto sharp nails tapping their way across the screen. This time Eris remains silent, pointedly ignoring him when he glances at her reflection in the window, but even her silence has a minatory flavor to it, smugly allowing him to stew in the aftermath of her comments, left to his own devices to wonder if the stab of indignation flaring in the middle of his chest like an ignited flame came from hurt pride or because her accusations carried a substantial sting of truth he was trying too hard to deny.

No need to figure out what words Eris might use to describe him when she’d laid out her case in stark detail before, leaving him feeling like a terrier’s chewtoy that had been given a violent shaking before being spat out again. Weak, ineffectual, insipid, unremarkable, unskilled and untalented. The definitions she’d chosen for him were less esoteric or flowery in nature and more brutally to the point. He disagreed with every point she’d made, but they continue to recycle through his head regardless with more devastating effect than the disdainful criticism of his old piano teacher who’d been less calculating and cruel in her offhand remarks about what she regarded as his total lack of redeeming skill at the keys, but just as hurtful and infuriating in her ability to inflict lasting self-doubt, especially for someone charged with encouraging exactly the opposite in her student. Eris had no such obligation with him and she clearly enjoyed the liberty of picking apart every lasting detail of who he was; of getting a rise out of him exactly as Teague had suggested might happen. She was no one whose approval he’d actively seek or care about, but it’s difficult not to rehash her negative assessments when her voice keeps echoing in his head with the same monotonous clatter of her nails on the phone’s screen.

It wasn’t that he believed everything she’d said or that her cursory remarks held more weight than Phil’s or any of those he considered true friends who cared and listened and appreciated all of what he did or had to say, but in the heat of the moment her words take on a magnitude impossible to ignore completely, the same way otherwise small, insignificant details became disproportionately annoying when one was too stressed to handle anything with lighthearted objectivity. Suddenly the small things took on more importance than they were worth and one stranger’s jeering critique assumed the strange debilitating power to undermine every ounce of confidence built up through years of personal effort. He’d tell himself it was nothing, he wasn’t bothered at all, but the sharp twinge of his fangs needling his bottom lip every time he bites it out of an unconscious nervous habit alerts him that he was in fact bothered. He might call it anger more than bothered, but he supposes they were really both one and the same. To be angry and bothered that he was angry to begin with, bothered that he had no set plan for how to confront or waylay an encounter he couldn’t prepare for and angry for having been forced into a situation where every effort to reach a diplomatic resolution allowing him and Phil to walk away unharmed failed miserably.  
As he thinks about it he frowns and bites down again. The right fang catches a subtle uneven groove in his lip with unintentional savagery, dragging down and across like a barbed hook and immediately the taste of blood stains his tongue. In the hazy reflection of the window he looks closer to see more blood welling up from a tiny puncture where it spills over and stains the tiny fissured cracks making up the texture of his lip like so much ink bleeding out into the veins of rough grained paper. The wound, tiny as it is, begins to heal at once and he unselfconsciously licks away the bead of red left behind.

_Great. I’m giving myself worry induced snakebites now. Maybe chewing pencils isn’t such a bad habit by contrast; better than trying to turn the lining of my mouth into a sieve anyway._

Teague hadn’t mentioned his fangs might also lengthen in response to his mood without the motivation of hunger behind it, but they’re sharp and aching in his mouth regardless, primed to bite and tear, but their only unfortunate victim at the moment is the lip he continues to knead restlessly between his teeth. If he keeps it up, at this rate, no amount of lip balm in the world will help cure the deep trenched marks he leaves behind with every razor edged nip he inflicts, not that as a vampire he might need any lip balm if his blood acted as a restorative to most injuries, but he didn’t exactly fancy tearing his mouth to ribbons in the meantime, much less allow Eris the satisfaction of noticing his quiet seething anxiety. The impulse however is hard to break and without a more welcome diversion available to draw him out of the manic cocktail of overwhelming frustration, confusion and fatigue drowning his brain in tangled signals and muddled ideas, he’s stuck on an exhaustive loop of thinking and biting and wondering and biting some more.

After a comfortable few moments spent in the company of two friends who’d pledged their unwavering support of him, now, caught in a car speeding its way to whatever nebulous resolution his encounter with the Court might bring, without Phil and Teague’s presence to assure or encourage him, he’s left feeling curiously alienated. Comparable to the time when, as a freshman about to inaugurate a new chapter of his life in a university dorm, he’d stopped short in the aisle of a supermarket, flanked on either side by the cold chill of the dairy aisle and realized he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to do as a legal adult meant to fend for himself. He was just one more student out of thousands more in another city in a different part of the country, separated by more than just distance from the familiar boundaries of a home where most of his daily needs of laundry, food, refuge and finances had been sorted for him. Gone were the usual systems of support that came with the convenience of having old friends and family in close proximity. In their place he was left to orient himself to new friends and places and means of assistance. The only problem was, as the implications had slammed home with the force of a sucker punch, he could only think of how much he’d left behind and how little he actually knew about how to cope other than scraping the burnt sides off overcooked toast and avoiding the bed linen wrapped street performer playing a bad game of Statues in the city centre. Properly caught off guard, he’d been left staring mindlessly at the gallons of milk on display, puzzling shoppers as they passed him with faint looks of concern on their faces, perhaps wondering if the milk supply had been tainted with a horrific anomaly they couldn’t see, as he’d assimilated the shock of realizing he was alone to apply his own wits to withstand and survive the challenge of figuring out not only his needs but also himself.

Becoming a vampire and dealing with their council of authority was a far different scenario than learning how to iron clothing without burning off a layer of skin in the process or figuring out a way to study for exams that wasn’t a last minute spree to absorb every bit of available information short of physically cramming his notes in his ears, but the sentiment of floundering for comprehension was the same. He’d walked away from university after rallying enough confidence in his abilities to create his own future without the need to memorize extraneous facts for a degree he might never use, all with some help via Phil’s motivational coaxing. But he could never walk away from himself, rather, from the fallout of his own subconscious worries and regrets, much less he could walk away from what he’d become.

It still begged the question of what exactly he’d become, what manner of hybrid of human and monster beyond the simple definition of simply vampire or simply Dan. It was difficult to accommodate change be it unprecedented or gradual, whether as a student coping with the demands of a university degree whose significance seemed more taxing and conflicting than it was worth or as a vampire just discovering what it meant to assume the identity of a myth made reality in the midst of a universe largely indifferent and somewhat hostile to its inhabitants, human or otherwise. The challenge in both scenarios was a question of not losing himself to darker instincts or giving in to defeatist voices as he worked towards creating his own path in life before others made it for him. He recognized his strengths, he understood his capabilities, he knew what he was good at, but doubt had a way of gaining a foothold when least expected, especially when external opinion echoed internal misgivings, causing him to lose sight of himself. Eris, he understood, was trying to manipulate this crack in his defenses, break him down in order to build him up into the definition of whatever she thought he should be, something so far afield from everything he recognized about himself that he might fall into the trap of believing every snap judgment to become only what the Court wanted him to be-their lackey, their puppet, their pet.

 _It’s a game,_ he thinks. _And if I’m not careful it’s me they’ll end up playing in the end._

Still, despite feeling the worse for wear after his uncomfortable interrogation, in terms of summing up his reaction to her promised threats, he thinks no phrase on earth, foreign or otherwise, could best convey his contempt than a staunch middle finger salute.

_She wants me to feel defeated, to get me to surrender willingly, but I’m no one’s pawn, least of all hers, even if at the end of all this, giving in might seem like a better option than enduring whatever they have planned for me and Phil if I don’t cooperate._

If Eris was only the teaser for what awaited him then the rest of the Court would continue what she started, to try and get inside his head, to push buttons and try his endurance, all with the endgame of determining what to make of him in order to figure out what to do with him later. And if he fell short of expectation, worrying over existential consequences or escaping the repetitive morass of his thoughts would be the least of his concerns.

_I suppose it’s not as if I could bash the door down with my shoulder and make a break for it…_

He has a brief mental image of himself flailing sideways, incapacitating Eris the best he could with bound hands before crashing out the side door onto the road and racing his way through the darkness of the storm back home where he could hack away the ropes constricting him with Teague’s help. Afterwards he’d secure as much of their finances as they could on short notice in case the Court also had a means of remotely freezing their accounts, to then whisk himself and Phil off onto the next flight out of England before Eris could catch up and retaliate with something worse than just her clawed hands scrabbling at his face. It might be too late to be only human again, but it wasn’t too late to decide he’d rather tell the Court to piss off and stuff it.

He believed Eris would deliver on her promise to sabotage every aspect of their lives so that maintaining their careers, keeping friends and family, would become impossible. But maybe it was worth living a life on the run than a life manacled to the whims and threats of strangers he didn’t want to meet. What if he revisited his original plan to go somewhere far away? They could disappear, rent a variety of small villas on remote islands; travel within parts of countries where their names were not as well known, like booking their own manner of global tour without the social or professional commitment. They could start over under new aliases, apply their talents in other ways while become living urban myths of a sort to be discussed on forums and blogs in mystified exchanges centered on articles headlined with bold faced captions of ‘Whatever Happened to Dan and Phil?’ In time they’d set off their own following of conspiracy theories peppered with farfetched explanations and grainy photos as possible sightings.  
_Not like we haven’t dealt with much the same before,_ he thinks with a wry smile.

They could run and lose everything, but they would be together; they would be alive.

 _No…_ He dismisses the idea almost as soon as it occurs to him. _No, we can’t. It wouldn’t work, just like Phil said before._

Playing the realist now of all times is almost physically painful, but doing the opposite and acting out the Bond like scenario of a reckless escape plan, no matter how interesting or preferable it was to say fuck the consequences, would be an assured death sentence.

_Even if I somehow managed to overpower Eris by some miracle, the Court would never leave us alone then. We’d always be right in the crosshairs of their attention, like having to deal with the supernatural paparazzi, the kind that wants us dead instead of selling our photos to a magazine. I wouldn’t put it past them to target all the friends and family we’d leave behind just to get to us. Besides, Phil already compromised enough to stay with me when he knew what I’d become, he doesn’t need me to ask him to become a fugitive too... Neither of us needs that. You can only run for so long anyway before you decide it’s better to turn around and face the music. Just not sure I like the beat right now._

If he didn’t like the metaphorical rhythm of his current situation he cares less for the present state of the music continuing to circulate inside the cabin of the car. The bass threshes on with the same crashing, grinding snarl of dissonant clicks and mechanical whirrs turned darkly melodic and persistently threatening. At home, nestled into the layers of his duvet with the lights turned low and his mind nicely settled, he’d find something artistic and powerful in each thudding note, but now he only thinks the entire song sounds like the aural equivalent of a headache. He wonders if it would be too much to ask if they could change the playlist to something a little less overtly menacing, say, something more ambient and relaxed and not quite so tightly laced around the corners with somber overtures to drive home the gravity of the dangers he faced as if he wasn’t aware. But he doesn’t suppose requesting lullaby covers of Radiohead songs would go over so well.

Before he can summon the nerve to ask anyway, the tap tap tap of Eris’s nails suddenly halts and for the first time she looks at him, glancing pointedly at another healing cut on his lip before announcing with a pleased smile, “we’re here.”

In the murk of rain and condensation blurring the windows Dan would’ve thought it impossible to discern where ‘here’ exactly was, but as the car clears the apex of a small hill he clearly makes out the golden squares of lighted windows adorning a grand Palladian house in the distance.

_Mansion, more like. It’s huge…_

On a good day the place would have a bucolic grandeur about it, situated as it was in the middle of a great arching lawn dotted with copses of trees and lush flower beds brimming with roses and hydrangeas, but at night, in the storm, it’s less Pemberley estate and more Hill House in nature.

The car slows and crunches its way over a winding lane of gravel past ghostly silhouettes of tall white marble statues before finally coasting to a stop under a large colonnaded carriage porch. Rain crashes down on either side of the overhanging structure like makeshift waterfalls and the sound reverberates through the car with minute vibrations Dan can feel trembling the armrest at his side, as if they were parked between the idling racket of two London buses.

They’re clearly expected by how the intimidatingly sized oak doors of the entranceway to the great house are already flung open, spotlighting the car in a harsh yellow glow. Standing at the foot of the steps leading up to the doors are a woman and a man dressed in the black understated uniforms of household staff who watch the car with impassive expressions, clearly meant to be the formal welcoming party.

“We’re here in record time. Looks like you earned your bonus after all.” Eris reaches into a pocket tucked away into the lining of her coat and pulls out a rolled wad of £20 notes. “Take the rest of the night off, Eugene. You’ve done well.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” The driver reaches back to receive his payment and not once glances in Dan’s direction, too thrilled at the prospect of going home with a wallet stuffed to bursting to worry over the fate of his passenger.

“Thank god we’ve moved past the age of horse drawn carriages when it took a year and a day to get anywhere and longer to get the smell of manure out of your clothes. But then, I’ve found you could never incentivize a horse to do as much as a human with a little flash of green in front of their nose.” Eris straightens the lapels of her coat with a sharp tug and turns to look Dan over. “As for you- try to be on your best behavior. Everyone’s so…eager to meet you. If you tread carefully and mind your mouth you might just earn the privilege to live.”

She reaches out before he can react and taps the still raw mark on his lip with a smirk, laughing when he jerks his head away.  
“The ride’s over. It’s time to introduce you to our world.”

She opens the car door, still smiling, still trailing the scent of death as she moves and as Dan looks back towards the yawning maw of the entrance to the house he thinks he doesn’t need a neologism to describe his emotions as anything other than dread.

For a moment, after Eris opens the door on his side of the car and waits for him to exit, he briefly contemplates staying put in a show of rebellion, childish and futile as the small protest might be.

Eris only rolls her eyes when he hesitates and crosses her arms. “I could always pull you out by those ropes and drag you up the stairs and through the house if you like. It’s your call.”

He can see himself bouncing up the stairs as Eris yanks him to the door, pulled along like a dog on a short leash for everyone inside to see, and he decides he’d rather have the meager dignity of walking on his own two feet instead. Sometimes you had to choose your battles, he thinks, but as he looks at Eris and the looming fortress of a house behind her he wonders what happens when the battles choose you.

He slides out of the car without a word and as if summoned by an unseen signal the woman at the foot of the stairs moves immediately to approach them, the permed curls of her hair jostling in a honeyed froth around her head as she goes. As she nears, Dan immediately notices the cold silence of her pulse.

_No heartbeat…She’s a vampire too._

The woman greets Eris with a subtle bow and a furtive suspicious glance at Dan from beneath her lashes. “Ma’am, Aeacus would have a word with you.”

“He always has a word with me and it’s never anything so serious he can’t communicate it in a text if he’d only learn how. Even Lethe’s mastered it and she can never remember what year we’re in, let alone what country.” Eris shrugs the coat off her shoulders in a dramatic swirl of fabric and hands it off to the woman, never stopping in her brisk stride as she makes her way up the stairs with sharp ringing clicks of her heels on the polished stone. “Tell the others I’ll be with them soon. I need to arrange our guest first.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The woman bows her head and with another quick glance at Dan she briskly moves up the stairs, into the house and out of sight.  
The man left behind, Fergus, from how Eris addresses him with a curt beckoning gesture, shadows Eris’s footsteps up the stairs and this time Dan hears the unmistakable regular thud of a human heartbeat coming from him. At this point, Dan isn’t surprised at the indifferent expression on the man’s face. Like the driver, money seemed a lucrative enough gag order for most of the Court’s hired help to not question the nature or ethics of their employers.

 _And those that do anyway probably have a tendency to disappear,_ he thinks.

Eris turns at the top of the stairs to look back down at him. “Are you going to stand there all night or have you changed your mind about me pulling you through the house?”

With a start, Dan realizes he’s been frozen in place since getting out of the car and awkwardly makes to shuffle his way up the stairs, hands stiffly held in front of him. Fergus watches him with an undisguised sneer of amusement, making a point to look him up and down, assessing the wet state of his clothes and drying tousled curls on his head with acute disapproval as if he thought Dan were the very picture of malignant delinquency, unfit to even be within five miles of the property. It’s the same look Dan remembers seeing on the face of a waiter at a formal restaurant he’d attended as part of a surprise birthday party for Louise, when they had endured a four hour long gauntlet of haute cuisine featuring dishes with names he could barely pronounce complemented by the snooty disdain of the waiter who’d looked on their table with an air of mocking tolerance similar to Fergus’s.

At that moment, tired, frustrated, feeling more out of his depth than he would’ve liked, Dan decides he’s had it with being made to feel like a visible piece of lint caught in someone’s hair and turns the full effect of ‘The Look’ on Fergus, matching him stare for stare.

 _Alright, mate, maybe just back off a bit_ , he means to convey, _because despite the situation I’m in, between the both of us, I think I’m the one with the leg up on immortality and a personality that isn’t overcompensating for being nothing but a vampire’s bellhop._

Something of his unspoken challenge must translate perfectly or maybe his stare is too feral, too full of muddled anger and frustration a hairbreadth’s away from turning his eyes opaque with darkness, because Fergus hesitates and his former haughty attitude collapses into one of wary reticence as he quickly looks away.

“If you’re both done, then. I may be undead, but I don’t have all night and neither do the others.” Eris quirks an eyebrow and Fergus snaps to, deferring all his attention to her with a look of single minded fawning devotion Dan finds somewhat disturbing. They continue inside and Fergus shuts the doors behind them with a hollow echoing thud followed by the trundling snap of many locks sliding into place.

From the extravagance of its exterior Dan had already known what he might expect to see once entering the house, but he’s quite unprepared for just how much more extravagant the interior actually is. His first tipoff is the crystal chandelier in the foyer, an ungainly sparkling chaos the size of a refrigerator that would be right at home in the psychedelic environs of a Robot Restaurant in Tokyo Phil had once shown him a clip of. The vaulted ceiling it hangs from features wood panels carved with scenes of trees, figures and animals too far away and minutely detailed for him to see clearly, but there’s already enough at eye level to occupy him for a year. Too much, to be honest, he thinks.  
His first impression of the house is to describe it as grandiose and terrifying, like walking through the manifold chaos of a Bruegel or Bosch painting in which color and movement vied for equal importance on the canvas, drawing the eye first here and then there and then back again to reveal something missed on a first glance and then once more around to show a third glance was needed to see it all. It’s Baroque and Rococo, Art Nouveau and neo Grecian, Oriental and Byzantine. More and more it feels like the type of place a billionaire with a hoarding habit, acute indecisiveness and too much time on their hands would design. _AHS Hotel meets Portobello Road Market,_ he thinks wryly as he passes a table lined with gold plated dog statues and ornate pearl embedded candelabras. It’s like when Yilmaz had overwhelmed him in the flower shop, drowning his mouth with blood and power, sending him stumbling from the shop in a stupor of buzzing nerves and heightened senses to confront a world stripped back to the raw naked grandeur of every sight, sound and smell magnified to a terrible, extravagant riot. The mansion is a condensed reflection of that experience, not quite as overwhelming as his first night had been, but markedly similar. Even as a human without a vampire’s excelled vision he still would have been left reeling at how much there was to look at, everything competing for relevance in a show of splendor more intense than the world beyond the mansion’s four walls. It’s opulence in extremity, evidence of owners with deep pockets and deeper bank accounts for whom money was no object; the kind of boisterous display of affluence that towed the line between tacky and decadent, communicating ‘you don’t belong here’ in ways more subtle and effective than Fergus’s silent sneer.

One detail that ruins the luxurious effect of the house is the strange bitter smell in the air. It’s more pervasive and horrible than Eris’s perfume, like rotten garbage or putrid eggs. He wrinkles his nose and makes a face which Eris notices.

“Oh that. I agree, it’s not pleasant. We had work done on the gas lines yesterday-a temporary soldering job until they can be replaced completely, or so I’ve been told. The grunt work of managing contractors and renovations usually falls under Makhai’s purview. I’ve never had the patience for wrangling all the structural intricacies that come with owning an estate this old. It’s like waging a constant war with building permits and legal loopholes, but then he’s always been better suited at the art of war, even if the battle is only against the tedium of bureaucracy.” Eris sniffs and makes a face of her own. “Now the only problem is although most of the rooms are soundproof they’re certainly not smell proof. It’ll take days before it’s gone completely.”

Dan doesn’t ask why the rooms are soundproofed, not sure he really wants to know and almost certain he could probably guess why. Instead, he says nothing and follows Eris’s slight figure as she treads ahead of him down the hall past oil portraits depicting aristocratic figures in various stages of period dress, their eyes wet with textured shine and shadows to give the haunting illusion of sentience so that as he walks by their painted stares seem to follow him. One of the portraits looks familiar and he pauses long enough to recognize Eris’s face looking back at him. She’s dressed in robes resembling an elaborately layered kimono in vibrantly painted reds and golds. Here, her long hair is styled with a severe middle part to allow it to stream on either side of her face like a hood and while her red lipped enigmatic smile is the same, he’s startled to see her displayed teeth and fangs are all painted a distinct pitch black as if she’d just eaten tar or were bleeding it from her gums. The longer he stares the more it appears the Eris in the portrait leers at him, exposing her blackened teeth into a death’s head grin, too horrifying and compelling for him to look away.

“Hmm, old makeup trends that never saw a revival in the twenty-first century, but then I suppose it’s better that way. It no longer has the association it once did.”

Dan jumps as Eris appears behind him, looking over his shoulder to appraise her own portrait.  
“Today, it’s customary to cap one’s teeth in gold or silver,” she continues. “I hear you can even tattoo them, but if you ask me, the effect isn’t the same.”

She smiles in the same fashion of her portrait, red mouth with prominent fangs and Dan can only think of how she would look ambushing a person in an alley late at night, lunging forward with teeth dyed to match her eyes like bored holes in her skull and he immediately regrets the mental image sure to haunt him whenever he closes his eyes to sleep. This time he’s all too willing to follow in Eris’s stead when she turns around to continue down the hall and the entire time he goes, although he’s certain it’s only his overworked mind toying with his imagination, he’s nearly convinced if he turns around he’ll see the portrait laughing at him.

Presently they pass on into a monstrous version of a lounge decorated with a density of marble statues, a great snarling mouth of a fireplace framed by equally daunting stone lions and another crystalline chandelier to set off the gold leaf boiserie panels along the walls. In the middle of the room a large aquarium is set flush with the marble floor and under the thick reinforced glass tropical fish in colors and shapes Dan has never seen before float lazily by in the blue glow of the lights shining under waving plants and silted gravel. As he watches, a striated bamboo shark placidly swims into view followed by the larger sleek silhouette of a nurse shark, both powerful and graceful in varying degrees and for a moment he stands there, rapt, staring at them in reserved awe until they float past the visible borders of the aquarium

Eris says nothing and Dan knows the silent treatment is meant to give him the greatest effect of the luxuries around him, to demonstrate the potential of what he stood to share if he relented to everything she and the Court asked of him, but all he can think about as he glances at the refracted brilliance of the chandelier above his head, other than the small fear of it suddenly falling down on top of him, are the simple lively colours of his flat, of his and Phil’s home filled with things that spoke to their interests; things that simultaneously comforted and encouraged him and made him feel like what it meant to be a person- to be himself and not a chess piece. However mundane it was he yearned for the familiar security of the home he’d helped create, to curl under Phil’s bright duvet that here might be seen as a garish affront to taste and just listen to the rain against the eaves and Phil’s heartbeat beating apace to slow as he drifted off asleep next to him. Home where extravagance was an occasional treat of buying fashions from labels he wanted to try and long movie nights tucking into freshly baked pizza with sauce slick fingers while sat side by side on a well-worn sofa that, for all its clumped stuffing and creased cushions, had become nearly as iconic as their bed covers.

To be home was to have freedom and to be here was to have neither.

He has a sudden vision of himself as a small hamster in an elaborately tricked out cage full of things to bide his time and attention and the analogy only makes the urge to leave grow into a harried panic. He never thought he’d find occasion to empathize with his childhood hamster Suki of all things, but he feels trapped here, alone and sequestered; content only to return to the anonymous dangers of the world outside than suffocate under the threat of constant judgment, surveillance and scrutiny.

 _It’s a cage,_ he thinks, _no matter how beautiful or rich, it’s still a cage and I want out._

“Cat got your tongue,” Eris asks. “You seem lost for words, especially for someone regularly paid to use them.”

“It’s…a bit much isn’t it? All this.”

“Perhaps, but when you have an eternity to spare and a virtual treasury of wealth to spend, why not indulge? I’m sure you’d do the same if given the chance.”

“Would I?”

“You’d be a fool if you didn’t. You can’t tell me all your newfound fame hasn’t lined your pockets with a bit more spare pocket change that you throw at all the things you were never able to afford years ago.”

“Sure, but I wouldn’t buy Bernini replicas to showcase in my living room,” he mutters pointing offhand to a set of statues towering before them.

“Not Bernini. Try Ernest-Eugène Hiolle and Augustin Canova. And they’re not replicas. The ones in the museum on the other hand are, despite what their curators think, but I understand what you mean. Simple minds enjoy simpler tastes.”

“And overblown egos enjoy overpriced wank. Understood.”

A weighted pause ensues. Fergus looks aghast and glances between them as if expecting Dan to be obliterated where he stands, but Eris only smirks.

“Always that mouth of yours.”  
She approaches him with the slow staccato click of her heels striking the marble floor and each step echoes like the popping report of a pistol going off. The fish scatter in all directions, away from the small tremors of her passage as she steps over the glass and when she stops, her face is close enough to prickle Dan’s skin with a chill. Her attitude is calm, her posture loose and free of any tension to suggest she might be gearing up for another strike at his face, but he remembers her grim smile in the portrait, her incredible strength in the car and the unreadable threat of her stare. Unpredictability was her calling card and he thinks perhaps while he was stuck in a house with no escape and no one he could trust to lend him a hand, it might be wiser to not rattle the cage bars too hard.

Rein it in a bit, his subconscious mutters, give the snap replies a rest for the night.

Eris raises a hand and softly pinches his bottom lip between the vice of her nails, filling his nose once more with the floral charnel smell of her perfume.  
“Even now, knowing I could swat you into the wall like a bug on a windshield, you insist on being the smart ass.” The pressure builds to an excruciating thrill of pain enveloping his lip and his jaw. An involuntary cry escapes him, a sharp “Ah-!” as her nails dig deep and he’s almost certain he’s about to receive the snakebites he narrowly avoided giving himself in the car, but just as the pain builds to a full bodied shudder down his spine, she lets go. “Then again- talk is all you are in the end isn’t it? It’s all you know how to do. I could hardly fault a dog for pissing on the furniture when that’s simply its nature. But that’s alright. With a little time and discipline even nature can be overcome.”

She steps back with a smug look mimicked by Fergus behind her and in an instant he forgets about being careful.

“Well, to quote an old movie franchise, nature tends to find a way. It’s only a matter of time before it’s done being forced into paradigms for someone else’s convenience and it comes back to bite you with a vengeance when you’re least prepared. Because now, that’s part of my nature too.” The answer tumbles from his mouth quick and sharp, with a flash of fangs behind the hot sting of his lip.

Rein it in? He doesn’t think so. Talk was something he did know how to do, with enough eloquence, candor and wit to land him a career where people took the time to watch him do exactly that. And as for being a smart ass, he thought it was better than being a dumb one. He didn’t have the exact word to describe all of who he was, he wasn’t sure if it even existed or if finding the right word mattered at all, not when there were days when his own definitions of himself changed and flowed into different forms day by day and year by year, but he did know he hadn’t come this far by following the blueprint for someone else’s life, but only by pursuing the vague idea of who he wanted to be and what he wanted to accomplish, with some inspiring encouragement from peers and good friends to guide him along the way.

 _And one very good friend in particular,_ he thinks. _Someone who always liked me best when I said what was on my mind even when I had too much to say. The same person who helped me change into the person I wanted to become; who brought out the best and never encouraged the worst._

In this situation he thinks Phil might be less encouraging of his current approach and advise against poking the proverbial tiger in the room, but Dan wasn’t one to roll over and concede defeat, be it to strangers taking up space in cinema seats he had reserved for himself and Phil or to a vampire with an opinion as uninformed and pompous as the interior design of this house. When it came to picking battles, experience had taught him when to compromise, when to stay silent and when to dissent from either. Digging in his heels against Eris was one such situation where he couldn’t and wouldn’t back down. Even if he wasn’t sure where his life would go from here, how it would adapt or change further as the years progressed- if he survived this evening with enough luck to see it through- it was still his life to do with as he pleased, his life to give personal significance to, his life to interpret and alter as appropriate.

 _Mine_ , he thinks. _Not hers. Not theirs. As long as I have a voice and half a brain cell in my head to think for myself I’ll rattle the cage whenever convenient, whenever they try to make me into something I’m not._

In Fergus he sees a bleak reflection of what his future could be if he relented. A subservient, docile mannequin without a voice of his own, existing only as a reflection for the Court’s every need and wish, feigning satisfaction in constant servitude to ideals which weren’t his own until one day he’d be brainwashed completely into thinking they were.

The Court may be wealthy and powerful, but they’re not about to share any of the perks that come with being at the top. They muzzle their “dogs” here. None of them are allowed to become leader of the pack. Not that I’d really want to be anyway, not on their terms.

He stands defiantly, his mouth still buzzing with the dissipating heat of pain and Eris smiles with a gleeful, almost beatific expression.

“Oh, was that a threat you just made? Is the little new blood developing some backbone after all? Good, it’ll make you more fun to play with.” Eris approaches again, more deliberate and quick and his body tenses for whatever might happen next. “In fact, I think I’d like to get started right now. Too bad I can’t decide if I like you better squirming because of what I say or because of what I do to you, but how about we find out-”

“Ma’am?”

The vampire with the permed mane of hair, who had met Dan at the entrance of the house, reappears in the room with the quiet swiftness of a ghost.

“What?” Eris pulls up short and whirls to face her in a stiff fury of grit teeth and clenched hands, like a child who’d just been called for by their parent at the least convenient moment.

“I-I don’t mean to interrupt.”

“And yet here you are.”

The woman offers a stilted bow as a means of hurried apology and continues. “It’s the others, ma’am. They wish to see you. Now. Before they see him.”

“Of course, they would. Of course. Instigating-!” Eris trails off with a string of muttered words too low to hear but from the tone Dan doesn’t think they’re anything complimentary.

She shoves her hair back from her shoulders and sucks her teeth. “Fine. We’ll pick this up again later. Fergus- take him to be dressed. I’ll retrieve him when I’m done.”

Dan frowns. “Dressed?”

“Of course ‘dressed.’ Look at you. When appearing in front of the Court you should look a little more presentable than a hobo in pyjamas. Consider it a housewarming gift. Or a parting one, depending on what happens tonight.”

With that, she turns on her heel and stalks from the room, viciously waving on the other woman to proceed ahead of her. The sound of her heels striking the floor marks her exit like a firing squad, setting the fish to scatter in a panic until the noise fades away down the hall back to ringing uneasy silence.

Dan’s relief at her departure is short lived as he’s left alone with Fergus, each of them looking at each other with the pointed discomfort of two people forced to endure each other’s company. In the ensuing pause Dan wonders what exactly Eris meant by his going to be ‘dressed.’ He can only imagine a fitting for an outfit on par with an inmate’s uniform, something to coordinate with the unconventional accessory of the ropes binding his hands in a manner less Westwood and more Wormwood. Then, Fergus gives him another thinly veiled sneer and gestures for him to follow in the same brusque manner as Eris.  
“Let’s get on with it then,” he says.

He leads the way down the hallway Eris had just disappeared into, but instead of tracing her steps to the end of the passage, Fergus turns right into another long, snaking hall and up a winding staircase to the second floor. They pass more hallways and tightly shut doors leading to rooms Dan can only imagine contain more portraits and chandeliers and architectural innovations to showcase the limitless budget used to create them. In the beveled glass of a monstrously proportioned gold framed mirror he catches a glimpse of his passing reflection. Tall, tired, tied up and lost. The alternate subtitle of my biography, he thinks.

“They’re impressed with you.” Fergus suddenly breaks the silence, never once breaking stride or turning around. “That’s rare you know. They only give audiences to the ones they’re interested in.”

He shakes his head as if in disbelief at the idea. “Can’t see why you’re so special. You look more of a delinquent with an attitude problem to me, but give them a reason to let you live and you might find yourself pleasantly surprised by what it means to be with us.”

“What-escorting vampires through a big ass house for the rest of my life,” Dan mumbles dryly.

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

In the long path of another hallway, one of the doors to the rooms they pass is open to reveal a ballroom just as lavishly accommodated as the lounge downstairs with a high vaulted ceiling covered in minutely detailed frescoes and moldings bristling with complex scrollwork patterns like sugar lace streaming down the walls. Inside, a small gathering of smartly dressed strangers, some in elaborate masquerade costumes with Venetian masks secured over their faces, talk and mingle around a banquet table brimming with candles and polished stemware while a pianist sways over the high polished shine of a Steinway playing a dizzying flurry of notes in allegrissimo. No one dances to the breakneck tempo of the waltz, apparently preferring to bask in the tide of conversation swelling around the room. Some of the discussions flow along in a prim high nosed mannerism littered with ‘darlings’ and ‘dreadful’s’ like actors in a stage play from a bygone era; others carry on in a distinct Bow Bells dialect of missing aitches, hard stops and stretched consonants. Without knowing whose house he was in, the whole scene would look innocuous-just people gathered together to share a glass and have a good time, but the decanters on the table and the glasses clutched in everyone’s hands are filled with blood instead of wine. He smells it an instant before he realizes all the party goers assembled here are vampires just like him. A few of them closest to the door notice Dan as he pauses to look and one of their number, a person dressed in a glossy black suit with a fox’s mask on their face, idly glances down at the manacle of ropes around his wrists. A sidelong glance to their companions, a muttered whisper from beneath the snout of the mask and the group bursts into uproarious laughter. A sharp aroma crests over their heads, stronger than the blood in their glasses, like the smell of heat pouring off boiling tarmac in summer or the burnt rice aftertaste he’d experienced in the car with Eris and in smaller doses on Fergus, a humid, heavy odor Dan realizes a moment later is merely an olfactic demonstration of their collective derision. Another person lifts a gore streaked glass in a mock toast to him and their laughter swells. As the smell of blood and dry heat rises, Dan takes his cue and swiftly hurries off, prompting a stronger gust of laughter and jeering whistles to follow him down the hall.

It’s then he starts to actively reconsider making his escape. Not later, but now.

In the car, quietly incensed and without an outlet to vent, he’d been prepared to meet the Court head on, to fight back against whatever might happen next, but now he wonders if maybe this wasn’t the right time or place to pick a fight with the Court, not in their literal backyard, in a house filled with people who would only join against him to make any fight on his part a losing battle, at least not one he hoped to survive. When it came to finding strength in numbers, Dan thinks in this case he’s at a bleak disadvantage. Alternatively, pretending to play along to bide his time until he could figure out a better strategy to strike back against them is out of the question too.

He could never stay here, not for a moment and not for longer.

Something tells him the effects of remaining in this house only grew more dangerous over time, like a toxic mold that would suffocate him if he stayed too long. He could never watch himself become like Fergus or one of the people in that room, none of whom he suspects were truly friends but only strategic conveniences to be used against each other as a means of gaining themselves a loftier foothold in whatever social hierarchy existed among the Court’s adherents; each of them alone and possibly miserable, hiding their true feelings between biting comments, practiced smiles and sips of blood while holding onto the promise of ascendant power and the high of a party mixed with intrigue that would never end. All to delay the inevitable realization that in their attempts to outwit each other they were in fact the ones being controlled by mysterious figures with calculated plans for sabotage or success. Here he could only see himself in the role of a live action Sim being guided along by random chance and the player’s every whim. Even if life itself was random and ultimately meaningless, subject to corruption and unfair twists of chance, he thought his odds of survival were better outside these walls than within it, even if it meant he and Phil might have to weather the consequences for what it would mean to run and eke out a new existence for themselves, far different than anything they’d prepared for. It wouldn’t be easy and he hated the idea of running away, but until they could devise a more feasible plan of retaliation good enough and strong enough to bring the Court’s reign to an end, running sounded better than languishing here for the rest of his foreseeable future, until both his spirit and mind corroded completely. Until he became every bit the monster Eris relished being.

The first step would be to escape, but if the first steps to any new endeavor were the hardest of all, then he thinks he’s already on his way to metaphorically face planting onto the floor.

He furtively scans his surroundings, looking for an opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of, but every door is shut tight and a glance at the large windows through the halls reveal a latticework of dense iron bars stretching across the glass outside, a trend he imagines continues for every window on the upper floors, most likely also reinforced with alarms set to trip at the slightest interference. Even if he could have managed the feat of bypassing the bars and alarm systems, he’s not keen on the idea of scaling his way down the steep, drenched face of the house. All it would take was one misstep, a slippery piece of molding and he’d take a dive the rest of the way to the grounds below. No matter how resilient he now was he didn’t like the idea of waiting for his body to mend a broken leg or ankle while the alarm alerted the house and half the neighborhood of his escape. Time was now the most precious commodity he had and there wasn’t a second to spare, not if he meant to try and gain enough of a head start back to Phil.  
With windows and doors for the moment ruled out, he’d have to find another less obtrusive means to flee, but first-

There’s still Fergus to figure out.

Dan considers him, wishing for a moment he could pick out less apparent clues to Fergus’s character, like Sherlock Holmes, the modern BBC version, with every deduction spelled out through the air in snappy AF Generation Z typeface to reveal all the ways he could play on latent weaknesses or habits to make a clever escape without Fergus shouting for help. But if there are any interesting details about the lint on his sleeve or the scuff marks on his shoes, Dan misses them all and instead draws the same obvious, largely unhelpful, conclusions: Human, domestic worker, average stature, middle-aged and fully unpleasant. It’d be easy to take him down if necessary, but hurting him is a plan of last resort Dan would rather avoid, not when his last bad scuffle in an alleyway with a group of drunken revelers had nearly resulted in disaster and then again with Phil, both times after he’d miscalculated his newfound strength and nearly succumbed to overwhelming hunger. The sounds of a struggle wouldn’t go unnoticed anyway and although Fergus had a snooty, slimy manner about him, Dan isn’t sure that necessarily warranted a death sentence.

_So how do I get rid of him?_

The question, quick and rhetorical, flashes through his head and just as quickly his mind conjures up an echo of Phil’s voice to supply the answer.  
"Just ask him nicely _."_

Dan rolls his eyes to the ceiling. _Wonderful suggestion. Let’s just throw in a fruit basket while we’re at it._

 _"_ No harm in at least trying. You have a better idea?"

_You want I should just…tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘hello there, Fergus, mate. Would you kindly please do me the favor of pretending you don’t notice while I make myself scarce and get out of this house? I know Eris will probably string you up like a piñata when she finds out, but hey, you signed up for this deal, not me.’_

_"_ If you knocked him unconscious you’d probably wind up giving the man a skull fracture at the same time. So if you don’t want to risk it, couldn’t you at least try talking to him first? I know you never really liked small talk with strangers, but I think you could make an exception in a life or death situation."

_I can’t see how commenting on the weather and asking what he thought of the Man City game last week is going to help the situation here._

He’s invested in the mental conversation now and it’s strange how naturally it flows despite being a manufactured product of his own mind, but there’s a vaguely therapeutic quality in creating a voiceover with Phil’s manner and inflection. It helps to consolidate the problem and break it down into a simple call and response he can pick apart to analyze while giving him the small comforting impression of not having to figure this all out by himself despite being alone. The only problem is the ‘Phil’ part of his brain continues to offer answers he can’t use and the ‘Dan’ part shuffles between overwhelming frustration blocking his ability to think and bleak meticulous rundowns of different scenarios in which he fails to escape each time. The ‘Phil’ part however continues to insist in the same stubborn vein as Phil himself, resolutely stuck on his own opinion for how to approach the dilemma, urging Dan to try and see what might happen.

_Right. I’ll never get anywhere like this. We’ll do it your way. Or Phil’s way. Or ‘Phil standing in for my subconscious’ way. Whatever._

He stops short in the middle of the hall and Fergus looks back over his shoulder. Dan clears his throat, searching for something to say. As the seconds tick by without a good enough starter to a conversation, Fergus’s brow creases in annoyance and he sharply flicks his hand for Dan to continue moving.

_What do I say??_

"It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it."

_This isn’t exactly the best time for a crash course in linguistics…_

_"_ And I’m not giving you one. You already know what I mean; you already know what to do. You did it once before by accident. Now you just have to mean it."

_What the hell are you on ab-?_

Before Phil’s ‘voice’ can clarify, Dan realizes he already understands. That night in the alley, when he’d found Phil and shouted for him to stay put, out of the way of his dangerous struggle with Ashton, he’d managed to compel Phil to obey through whatever latent ability of hypnotic suggestion Teague had said vampires possessed. Maybe if he could compel Fergus to ignore him and allow him to leave, finding a way out might not be so difficult after all. ‘Phil’ was right, maybe talking would work. However, Teague had also mentioned using the ability successfully took time and practice to manage. Even if he had his phone, and his hands were free to use it at all, there likely wasn’t a video or Reddit page he could consult dedicated to life hacks for new bloods on a time limit, but Dan wonders if maybe he could forego the extensive learning curve and try it anyway.

 _…But what if I mess it up?_ he thinks. _What if I can’t?_

"You know you can."

_With some practice, maybe, yeah, but-_

"But you can’t practice now," Phil's voice in his subconcious continues. "So you just have to go with it. And besides, you never practiced for the eventuality of the tripod for our camera snapping during our first live radio show, but you made it through intact anyway and you always manage to pull through at the last second when our taxi’s at the curb and you’re still rushing through the house to get ready."

_Which gives you heart attacks every time._

"I just think you’d make it easier on yourself if you prepared ahead of time."

_You mean easier on your stress levels._

"Fine, but all it takes is one spray of deodorant to the eyeball while you’re racing round the bathroom to get ready before the taxi leaves without you and it’s all downhill from there.:

_That’s…a very specific and unlikely scenario._

"Maybe, but you’re not in a bathroom playing against the clock. You’re in a house filled with vampires you want nothing to do with and there’s one possible way out if you’d stop doubting yourself long enough to get on with it."

_But-_

"No." 'Phil's' voice supplies a strong interjection. "You don’t have time to analyze this to death or play the perfectionist. You need to move. I already told you-you’re clever and brave and you always manage to accomplish more than you think you might. Even when you don’t believe in yourself or your future because you’re not sure if your effort will be good enough to matter in the end when it really counts, for what it’s worth, I’ve always thought it mattered and so do you... I believe in you and I’ve never regretted it. If anyone can do this, you can."

At this point he doesn’t know if he’s being self-congratulatory or if his pseudo version of Phil, fed by every prominent memory he’d compiled over the years detailing Phil’s mannerisms and words, had taken on a life of its own. As if even his subconscious was aware he wouldn’t easily take his own advice if it wasn’t supplemented by the sincere encouragement of someone he trusted the most, in the way he could approach most strange and terrifying situations better when he had the presence of a friend by his side to give him an added boost of courage he might not otherwise have if he were on his own. He’s not sure what particular name to give this kind of coping mechanism, but it helps orient himself back to a point of confidence until he finally decides, with nothing else to lose, why not play the only card in his hand and see what happens.

"You always tell me to try something I’m hesitant about," ‘Phil’ speaks up again. "Now it’s your turn."

Dan doesn’t stop to consider the times he would also tell Phil to try kissing plasma globes and climb the stone lions in Trafalgar square, but that was beside the point. When you were out of options or friends with readily available words of encouragement, sometimes you just had to make do and invent your own. Eris had campaigned for Phil’s uselessness, marking him as a detrimental weakness in Dan’s life, but now more than ever Dan is convinced of exactly the opposite. Neither of them were inherently stronger or weaker than the other, rather, they had always found comfort in what they determined to be the best of each other’s character, just as most people found small pockets of inspiration in the everyday words and actions of their loved ones, to uplift them to better frames of mind in which they found the strength they’d momentarily forgotten they had all along. Dan had a reasonable amount of assurance in his own capabilities, in his creativity, intelligence and common sense. It was only a matter of how to execute them in a meaningful and effective way which more often than not was the problem. Inaction and doubt mixed with concentrated does of mild self-loathing had a tendency to paralyze him and Phil had recognized this, helping to remind him of what he could do, of what he had always been capable of doing, never allowing Dan to lag behind during heavier handed moments of introspection when all Dan wanted to do was curl up under the covers in his bed and take a prolonged nap. These were the small gestures of sincere compassion which made all the difference and which helped elevate Phil’s voice to become a deeply embedded part of his conscience that roused and innervated him to action when he might otherwise flounder in uncertainty.

We tell ourselves white lies to comfort ourselves from inconvenient realities, we create myths to compensate for the things we don’t understand, we tolerate small hurts in the belief that if we ignore them they'll go away-but it’s not enough to think and wait and wish-we have to act, Dan thinks, to change something, to affect anything, one must act. I’m not their pawn or their servant. I have some amount of power and now I have something I can’t really define, but I won’t ever be like them. I won’t give them a chance to make me like them. So, here goes nothing…

He looks at Fergus and concentrates, trying to willfully recreate that feeling of tenuous connection he’d established with Phil by pure accident. At first, there’s nothing. The only feeling he has is the awkward awareness of himself standing like a statue in the middle of the hallway, eyes narrowed and lips pursed with effort as Fergus begins to look at him with increasing concern. A few more seconds of silence and staring and Fergus’s mouth drops open with the intent, Dan is sure, of calling for assistance; to alert someone that the new blood in the house had suddenly stopped working like a frozen Windows program.

Panic sets in and on impulse Dan thinks in a rush, _No, No, No! Stop- don’t do that! Look at me! Look at me!_

Immediately, there’s something like the weak tug of a loose string and Fergus pauses. His mouth slowly closes and for an instant he looks confused, almost drowsy, and while he doesn’t seem completely under just yet, he doesn’t look away and he doesn’t call for help. Dan meanwhile hesitates between the fierce shock of unexpected success and utter disgust. The sensation is odd, like trying to grasp a thin, slippery wire in his hands as it shudders and writhes through his grip like a live creature. It’s distinctly unpleasant. There’s a quality of ‘wrongness’ about it, Dan thinks, a feeling that this isn’t something he should be able to do, to tap into someone else’s consciousness, so that if he really wanted to he could act as a person’s id and super ego, subverting every decision a person might make for themselves and assert his will instead, as if this time Fergus were the Sim under his control or as if he were Kira writing lethal instructions in a notebook for someone else to carry out to their inevitable doom. He doesn’t like it, not in action or in theory, but with circumstances as critical as they were he has no other choice. It was still the best and only option he had over a physical altercation he has even less desire for.

_And it’s working, so why complain? I can figure out the ethical implications of being a real life Mesmer later. Preferably after I’m back home._

Dan tries again, narrowing his intentions down into one encompassing demand for Fergus to be still, stay calm and listen to what he has to say. The string, whatever it actually was, some strange manner of empathy made physical by a branch of undiscovered physics, tugs harder with the pull of an anchored weight at the end as if he’d cast a line into Fergus’s mind and managed to hook something deep beneath the surface.

_Now I just have to pull back. Which in this case would be to say what I want him to do._

He waits for a moment, allows himself to feel the reassuring tug of connection to assure him it was still working and decides to give the experiment its first field test.

“Fergus,” Dan finally says in a calm, measured tone, “I’d like you to piss off.”

“I-excuse me?”

Fergus pulls back with a hard blink, face mildly annoyed and the string takes on slack. Any looser and Dan realizes he’ll lose the connection completely, maybe for good.

_Crap. What now?_

"You didn’t ask nicely," 'Phil' replies.

_Are you kidding me?? This is ridiculous-!_

"No. I told you- it’s not what you say, but how you say it. You have to frame it in a convincing way, like something he already wants to do, not something you’d rather he do, even if it comes out to the same thing. Think about it. He doesn’t like you. He’s jealous and suspicious. He’d probably rather be anywhere else right now, doing anything else. If you can’t appeal to his better nature, appeal to the part that just wants to be rid of you."

_How do you know that’ll work?_

"I don’t. I’m just a figment of your imagination."

_...Oh. right._

Teague had mentioned something along the lines of glamour being nothing like mind control. He could ask Fergus to take a proverbial long walk off a short cliff but if Fergus wasn’t already open to the idea he wouldn’t move, like now. Dan reasserts his hold on the metaphysical string between them, feels it tense up again as it catches hold and then he waits for Fergus to settle. Once his eyelids droop and the furrowed creases of annoyed indignation leave his face, Dan tries a different approach.

“Fergus, you really don’t like me. Is that fair?”

The lopsided sneer of Fergus’s mouth grows. Nope, not a bit, it says.

_God, what is this guy’s problem, Dan thinks but as soon as he does ‘Phil’ answers, invent one for him._

He puzzles over the suggestion, almost dismissing it as too absurd even by Phil’s standards, mental projection or not, but then he reconsiders. It wasn’t absurd, it was brilliant, which was only par for the course with most spontaneous ideas Phil suggested. If he was clearly undesirable No.1 in Fergus’s book, Dan thinks, why not capitalize on that dislike instead of wasting time trying to understand why? Establishing common ground by appealing to his enmity and spelling it out for him in words he couldn’t help but agree with was the perfect solution. The plan isn’t foolproof and it may not work at all, but right now commiserating with Fergus seems like the most efficient route towards securing not only his trust, but also his willingness to comply with whatever Dan asked.

 _When in Rome, hate what the Romans hate_ , he thinks wryly.

“No, you don’t like me at all,” he says with an agreeable air. “Why should you? I’m not dressed appropriately; I don’t act or speak appropriately, not in the way someone should when they’re in the presence of the Court. Look how I addressed Eris before- it’s just not on. In fact, you think I shouldn’t have been brought to this house at all. I don’t deserve to be seen by the Court.”

A heavy drunken nod, a twitch to the corner of his sneer and the invisible string becomes more substantial; the weight at the end growing heavier with Fergus’s subconscious relenting to every word Dan says.

“You’d like it if I was just taken off your hands wouldn’t you? If I wasn’t your problem anymore?”

The line inches closer, then pulls taut. If he rushed it he’d snap the connection. Too slow and he risked detection from someone turning the corner at the wrong moment.

_Careful, careful…One bad move and I’m done._

“Eris was the one who brought me here after all and even if you’re supposed to do everything she asks of you, you’d rather you didn’t have to be stuck with me. You’ve probably served here for what-years-a decade probably? Enough to earn seniority to exempt you from being my personal minder for the night?”  
Fergus nods again, more vigorously.

“Wouldn’t it just be much easier if I found my own way instead so you wouldn’t have to be bothered with me? You could just…let me walk off down the hall while you take some time for yourself.”

At that, the line bucks and twists in his grip and the drowsy mood of Fergus’s face shifts into mild suspicion.

“I mean, the house is so secure,” Dan hurriedly continues. “There’s no way I could escape, right? One new blood with his hands tied- how far could I get?”

A heavy pause follows and Dan thinks, that’s it, I fucked this up, when Fergus relaxes into a loopy pleased smile as he nods along to Dan’s suggestion.

Bullet dodged, crisis averted and Dan sighs in relief.

“Right? So how about you let me wander the rest of the way on my own and you get to enjoy the rest of the evening taking a break. You’ve already done so much work for them, you’re owed a little R&R every now and then.” Dan steps closer, winding the line around and around, winching it further towards himself. “All you have to do is leave. Turn around, go back the way you came and forget about me. Go somewhere that’s quiet and comfortable with no one around to see you or disturb you. Just go... Now.”

He yanks the line, gentle but forceful, and it offers no resistance. Neither does Fergus, who suddenly and swiftly turns on his heel and leaves without another word. In the next instant, as the sensation of holding an invisible tether fades from his mind, Dan finds himself alone in the great yawning stretch of the hall without an escort or anyone else around to realize what he’d just done.

Well then.

He stands there, mystified.

_It worked. Shit… It actually worked_

A warm cloak of accomplishment momentarily envelops him and he smiles broadly, half proud, half astonished he’d been able to pull it off, but the feeling dissolves rapidly as soon as he turns around to consider his surroundings and realizes he has no idea what to do or where to go next. Escape was now top priority. He couldn’t count on Fergus’s absence going unquestioned for too long, especially his own. Whatever mysterious conclave Eris had been summoned to wouldn’t take forever, not when his presence was the evening’s most anticipated form of entertainment, if everything Eris had said in the car was true. He was on the clock and he had no idea how much time he had left.

 _I’ve come this far, no point getting cold feet now. I just need to explore my surroundings, but quickly_. He glances at the series of closed doors leading up and down the hall and hopes no one decides to enter or leave them as he passes by. _Just have to keep out of sight of other people as far as possible and leave before they figure out I’m missing. …Right. Not difficult at all._

He was no stranger to getting himself out of bad situations. He’d already received enough tactical stealth training years ago while employed at Asda when, during one early morning shift, still hung over and asleep on his feet from a long night out he still hadn’t recovered from, he’d curled up under the desk in an empty office for a power nap and woken up hours later to parkour a mad escape away from the search party of bemused staff members looking for the narcoleptic teen somebody had found sleeping on the floor. He’d never been caught thanks in part to a high of fear fueled adrenaline and the saving grace of a colleague’s support to bail him out from his manager’s accusations. While in this instance he can’t depend on fool’s luck to save him again, he thinks if he was careful enough he might just be able to make it out of here intact.

He starts walking and tries to keep along the borders of shadows along the wall while listening for the sounds of approaching footsteps or voices. Other than the small party in the room he’d passed earlier however, the rest of the house appears quiet and still. He would have expected security detail at every corner, but apparently once you were inside there were little fears about anyone getting out again unless they were supposed to.

A sudden thought occurs to him and he glances up at the ceiling to check for cameras but finds none. Not to say there wasn’t a pinhole sized lens discreetly embedded in a cornice or lintel he hasn’t noticed, but he imagines if someone had been watching his performance with Fergus earlier the alarm would have been raised before he’d managed at least two paces down the hall. As he proceeds quietly back down to the bottom floor by means of a different staircase than the one Fergus had used, ducking and weaving his way behind statues and panel screens, all the while watching for the red blip of a recording device or an approaching footfall, detection quickly becomes less of a concern in the face of not being able to find an obvious way out.

The house’s floor plan is labyrinthine and confusing. Hallways proceed into apparent dead ends or empty out into more extravagant lounges with monolithic bookcases and winding staircases leading to bare faced walls. Every doorknob he discreetly tries is locked and although he can’t hear anything from the rooms behind the doors he smells a variety of things. Perfume, cologne and flowers makes up the less innocuous ones. From others he picks up more complicated aromas without a name to describe them, the kind of not-smells he’s come to affiliate with emotions and frames of mind. From one he picks up corrosive hints of anxiety and anger, from others the more alarming tinny, static stench of fear. From another comes a mixture of something like warm copper, salt and the same indefinable high attar tinge of love and lust he remembers surrounding him when he’d watched the lean angled shadow of Phil’s body hovering over him in the muted darkness of the bedroom. The sudden memory, the piquant smell of humid heat, the kind which came from the friction of intimate contact; of gentle motion building to an ecstatic peak, accompanied by a rhythmic vibration minutely shivering the door as he passes by, lends a mental image detailed enough to make him blush and hurry on. From behind another door wafts the equally poignant aroma of rain and ozone to indicate perhaps an open window and behind a few more doors he picks up the more enticing, but concerning scent of fresh blood, enough to make him wonder just how much of it had been spilled for it to be so potent.

The smell tugs at his instincts and the roots of his fangs itch with a kindling spark of hunger directing him towards one door in particular where the smell is strongest. Blinded by curiosity and steadily increasing thirst, he pauses inches from the wood frame and breathes in. He’s never been certain what it is about certain food based aromas that provoke such an explicitly charged reaction in him, one that had little to do with just hunger the way making love had little to do with just sex. One whiff of onions caramelizing in a sauce pan on the stove or freshly prepared cookie dough warming to golden brown in the oven and he could stand mesmerized for an hour picking apart every nuance of flavor in his head. Now he supposes the little shock of shudders down his arms have to do with being a vampire, with being a predator aroused by more visceral cues than the intricacies of culinary preparation. Body and Blood, he thinks suddenly and the song of the same name which had played in the car like Eris’s unwitting anthem echoes in his head to suggest just the exact sort of visceral cues his darker nature now responded to. He takes a step closer, nosing the air around the frame to get a better whiff. The smell is different from how it had been in the kitchen when he’d warmed his butcher bought variant on the stove. It’s sharper, fresher, with a certain quality that tells him the taste would be just as heated and rich as Phil’s blood had been. Not exactly the same of course, he thinks, nothing could match that particular experience in the same manner as Phil was a force unto himself, so that it seemed even the particles of plasma and platelets in his veins had subsumed every complex note of Phil’s personality and taken on a unique intoxicating flavor which could never be matched anywhere else, by anyone else. Forget Bordeaux’s and Rosés, Dan muses, if Phil were a vintage whose essence could be replicated, most wineries would find themselves scrambling to make a product half as extraordinary.

The thought, as subtly macabre and bizarre as it was, only teases the yearning pull of his thirst to a ravenous boil. Now his nose is pressed firmly against the door, mouth softly agape to allow space for the lengthening points of his fangs to curve further downward in sharp anticipation. He’s forgotten all about his previous mishap with Phil, the one which had led them both to the brink of no return, just as he’s forgotten all his prior reservations about losing his hard won control and reverting to the raw instincts of a true monster.

The only thought revolving on a loop in his head is, _I want it. God, I need it. Now...right now._

After all the stress endured by the car ride here and his subsequent clever victory over Fergus, he was due a treat wasn’t he? Yes, he thinks, this was about more than just hunger, this was a symbol of his tenacity, a just reward for trials endured and challenges won. Why shouldn’t he pat himself on the back with an enjoyable interlude? One small taste, maybe a second one for good luck, something to whet his appetite and tide him over until he arrived back home-it couldn’t hurt.

He’s unaware of the disconnected logic in this frame of thought, that if he did pause to drink his fill he’d be caught immediately, but then again hunger had never been the greatest proponent of rational thinking, particularly not when the drive to consume and relish has become a hardwired longing difficult to ignore. But just as his fingers twitch behind their webbed casing of knotted ropes to reach for the doorknob and rattle it until someone decided to let him in on the banquet apparently already in progress, another thought occurs to him-a mental image of himself caught in a vicious circle of blood and hunger, stuck in that room for the rest of his eternal life, like an ongoing purgatory of bad habits and blinding self-gratifying pleasure until he forgot both his name and his purpose. Just like a pet, just like their dog, he thinks and he can imagine the people in that ballroom treating him as such, cooing over and toying with him, holding a glass of blood just out of reach to see what he might do for a taste as the stench of their laughter rose in a noxious cloud around him.

It wasn’t that the idea of being pampered and spoiled and ravished was inherently bad on its own, he rather liked the prospect of having nothing to do but rolling around in a sea of soft bed sheets, all his cares squared away for him with little else to worry about but exploring all the myriad paths of pleasure he wanted to try, to be brought again and again to a zenith of satisfaction and indulgent personal contentment no matter how selfish it seemed on the surface. He had an eternity to live and he could spend that eternity curbing his pride and pledging his loyalty to the Court so he could have access to rooms filled with diversions to bide his time and appetite instead of worrying over an avalanche of external and internal crises without easy resolutions. If the world did operate on nihilistic principles where the sum of all actions and choices was ultimately meaningless on a universal scale, then why couldn’t he seize the chance to create his own insulated universe built on precepts of hedonism instead?

“Spoken with all the flawed sentimentalism of a budding addict who doesn’t know how badly ingrained their worst habit already is.”

Eris’s words come back with a vengeance to haunt him and although before she had been referencing what she’d seen as his flawed trust in Phil, the sentiment still applies now. He already had a penchant for sleeping in too late if he wasn’t careful, for turning lazy pajama mornings into lazy pajama weeks where nuzzling the pillow and having a private session dedicated to self-pleasure in ways more literal than others took precedence over human contact, business emails and his own creative output. Here, given time and enough rooms filled with a scent piquing a hunger he couldn’t ignore, he can easily see himself taking the next step from incipient habit to full blown addiction.

 _And they’ll cater to it_ , he thinks, _like a pusher with a gram to sell at a reasonable price to keep the customers coming back for more._

In any other circumstance, guilty pleasures were something he’d gladly enjoy without an ounce of guilt, but only in appropriate environments with appropriate people. Perhaps just the one person in particular, he amends, but not now. Not here.

Here, he could relent and become what the Court wanted him to be, every bit the pampered pet, ready to roll over and play obedient to a group of strangers and his own baser instincts. He could say goodbye to Phil, to his old life, to everything he had previously known himself to be or he could get a hold of himself, tamp down his hunger, reclaim his self-control and get back to the business of escaping before someone found him in the hallway with his mouth half open and drooling against the door exactly like a junkie desperate for a fix.

In the end, he doesn’t need a renewed pep talk from a manufactured echo of Phil’s voice to help him decide leasing his will, his very identity, for a sip of blood and a sensualist high was too steep of a price he wasn’t willing to pay.

With no small amount of difficulty, he swallows the urge coiling in his stomach with the same swelling bloom of pressure preceding an orgasm and turns his face away. It takes a more concentrated effort to put one foot in front of the other and force himself to head back down the hall with the smell of blood still trailing around his nose, quietly begging every nerve in his body to stop and turn around, to forget everything else and feed. It’s worse than late night snack binges at three a.m. when he’d raid the refrigerator for something sweet, compelled by an inexplicable craving that wouldn’t be satisfied until he ate that bit of chocolate pastry or pistachio muffin left over from the day. As he continues moving however, focusing only on the more crucial imperative to escape, it becomes marginally easier to quell the rising ache of hunger back to dormancy although his fangs remain sharp and full in his mouth, itching his gums in silent protest at having nothing but air to bite down on.

A few more paces and the scent thankfully recedes, allowing him to continue on his way in peace. It’s a relative kind of peace however as ravenous hunger swaps out to the same frustrated confusion over roaming through a house with no end to its locked rooms, eerie portraits and dizzying hallways.

 _It’s like playing Silent Hills_ , he thinks, _only this time I want it to be canceled…_

“Leaving already?”

Dan’s heart kick-starts itself from a torpid barely there rhythm to an electrified jolt in the middle of his chest as he whirls around to face-  
No one.

The hall behind him is empty but from around the corner he hears two sets of footfalls fast approaching- two vampires from the sound of their own quiet heartbeats. If he lingers where he stands, they’ll run right into him, but even if he races off at the full capacity of his ability, they’re too close for him to make it the full length of the hall and ducking out of sight without them noticing. He needs somewhere to hide and fast, but the only form of cover lies in a slim necked oriental vase, a bust of the queen on a powder white pillar and a small alcove covered by a brocade curtain. With the first two hiding places on par with a Scooby Doo skit gone wrong, the alcove wins without contest and he darts over to it straightaway.

Hidden behind the curtain, in the small recess of the wall, he finds barely enough space to fit behind a single wooden chair and a small side table bearing an antique rotary telephone that would look right at home in Downton Abbey. It’s accompanied by a simple vase with flowers (red hibiscus, he notes without a hint of surprise) and a memo pad overlaid by an ornate fountain pen as if prepared specifically for anyone to take down notes while on the phone. He’s in too much of a hurry to question why anyone would stoop to using a corded landline over the more modern convention of a cellphone and instead draws the curtain behind him with a swift yank just as the footsteps turn into his section of the hall to continue the conversation already in progress.

“I wouldn’t normally go so soon, not when invitations are so few and far between these days, but I don’t know-it’s just not as interesting tonight. I liked the party at the Eaton Square estate better. Now that was really something. Remember? The costumes, the music and all those pretty decorations Eris arranged from the ceiling.”

“A few of them passed out and had to be taken down if I recall.”

“Well, that’s really the point of the whole thing isn’t it? If it doesn’t take you out of your head completely where’s the fun? None of those humans were complaining about it at the time. Then again no paying customer of Eris’s ever complains. I should give it a go one day.”

The voices draw nearer and Dan winces away from the slivers of light seeping in between the seams where the ends of the curtain meet the walls on either side of the alcove’s opening. For added insurance he crouches behind the table, painfully aware that the three foot tall structure does nothing to hide someone possessed of a lanky six foot tall stature like him.

“It’s probably so quiet because the Court are all busy upstairs. I don’t think we’ll be seeing Eris or any of the rest of that lot for the entire evening.”

“It’s about the new blood right? The one we saw earlier, Eris’s little conquest.” A low aside of laughter. “What’s so special about him?”

“You don’t know? He’s one of Yilmaz’s.”

The voices cut off into silence and the steady thud of footsteps comes to an abrupt halt. Dan looks down towards the inches of space left where the curtain hangs suspended off the carpeted floor and sees the dim silhouettes of two people standing just out of view, close to his hiding place.

_Too close. God, way too close._

If he had the normal respiration of a human Dan thinks he’d be grossly aware of his own harsh breathing right now and although he’s sure they haven’t been alerted to his presence he mentally wills even the small blip of his pulse to stop completely.

“Yilmaz?” The first voice picks up again and Dan relaxes a fraction of an inch. “Thought that was just a rumor.”

“Apparently it’s true. Everyone in the party was talking about it, didn’t you hear?”

“Please.” The second voice scoffs. “I don’t have time for most of the twaddle spread by the lie mongers in that room, trying to let on as if they know more than they really do. It’s all vague subterfuge and unsubstantiated gossip because it keeps the questions coming, so they can act as if they have all the dirty secrets and all the best sources when it’s nothing but hot air.”

“This time’s different. Especially the way Ashton was going on a few nights ago. You should have heard him. Pacing the halls, making a scene, telling anyone who’d listen how he was going to petition the Court for his rights to claim what the new blood ‘stole’ from him when it turned out the intended prey was the new blood’s friend.”

At this Dan perks up and listens, aware by the word ‘prey’ they mean Phil.

“Since when does Ashton care that much about a bit of civilian grade blood?”

“The way he tells it, this pick was a rare one. A real prize in his book, but I just think he’s embarrassed by the whole affair. A steward outclassed by a barely days old vampire. Disgraceful, really. I’d say he’s lucky the new blood turned out to be a rare prize himself or else the Court would have held the entire incident as a black mark against Ashton instead.”

The footsteps proceed and their shoes come into view, one pair of snakeskin oxfords with silver capped points and the other a pair of black velvet stilettos.

“I heard Ashton was so incensed by the Court giving precedent to the new blood over his demands for restitution that he sent one of his own lackeys to the new blood’s house to retrieve the friend and bring him here just to settle the matter once and for all.”

Shit…Dan reflexively grabs the table leg without thinking, barely aware of the tiny cracks running up the wood under his tightening grip.

“So? Are they back yet? What happened?”

“No one was home. Turns out the human cut and run by the way I hear it. Probably well on his way out of the country and I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t want to be caught up in that mess either. Wonder how much therapy the poor bastard’s going to need.”

They laugh and Dan grips the table leg harder.

“You can’t tell me the Court actually believes the old story? That one of Yilmaz’s progeny would be their downfall?”

“God, no. It’s just an old myth- a superstitious claim leftover from the days when we still believed lead could be turned into gold and people thought the Black Plague was just a beautiful spirit who flew through the air killing people. It’s nothing. But considering their history with Yilmaz I suppose they’ve decided to err on the side of caution.”

“Funny isn’t it? I hear Yilmaz used to be a simple weaver back in her time before she became the notorious creature we all talk about now.”

“Time has a way of changing the fates of the most unassuming of people. Apparently, any blowhard can be president and any clown can be a vampire.”

“Where’s the new blood anyway? Daniel, I believe he’s called.”

“Most likely on his way to be prepared for his meeting with the Court. A good thing too, did you see the state of him before?”

“I don’t think it makes much of a difference how he’s dressed, Yilmaz’s brood or not. What’s that old saying about a silk purse from a sow’s ear?”

The same dry heat stench of baking tar creeps through the curtain to aptly translate the gist of the obscure adage as a jeering dig at him. Between his revulsion at the smell and the piquing anxiety over wondering where Phil could have gone he’s unaware of the warping shifting wood under his clenched fist until a loud crunching snap breaks the silence. Alarmed, Dan snatches his hand away but it’s already too late.

“What was that?”

“What do you mean?”

“That noise…” The pair of oxfords draws near and stops. Dan tenses, waiting for the inevitable pull back of the curtain to flood the alcove with light and break his cover, but as the seconds draw out into the full-bodied pause of a minute, nothing happens.

“Probably the storm. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The stilettos shift in place restlessly. “Sounds like the whole house might come crashing down at any second the way it’s carrying on out there. I almost canceled my plans for tonight. The roads were a nightmare.”

“Yes…but still. Do you smell that?” The oxfords draw to the edge of the curtain, pointing away towards the end of the hall, but still too close for comfort.

“Something molten, like a hint of anger and something else-”

A sniff, another step closer.

“Yes. A slurry of bad thoughts and apprehension.”

An answering snort of laughter follows. “Wow. How awfully poetic of you. I have no idea how you’re able to smell anything over all that rain, not to mention the gas odor still lingering in the house after the work done on the lines yesterday.”

“Hmm.” The oxfords pause, and for a panicked moment Dan thinks the silver capped points are subtly turning towards the curtain like dowsing rods unconsciously attuned to his presence, but at the last second they side step away. “No, you’re right. Probably just one of the others having a bad time holed up in their rooms.”

“If it’s any of the humans in Dwight’s room, then ‘bad time’ is an understatement. I know some of us can get worked up into a frenzy, but the way he goes at his prey it’s like he’s conducting open heart surgery with his hands. I pity the cleaning staff that has to deal with disposing the linens afterwards. Not to mention the smell-you’d think he’s painting the walls with blood in there. But then, we all have our little quirks I suppose.”

Dan knows they’re talking about the door of the room he’d just passed. He remembers the overwhelming pull he’d felt to go inside, to drink every drop of blood he could smell rising on the draft through the molding and an acidic aftertaste of bile rises in his throat at the description of what truly went on in there. In all the habits or practiced abilities he might pick up as the years went on, he hopes none of them might be the singular ‘quirk’ of dining on humans with all the compassionate grace of an industrial shredder.

“Well, I’m off,” the voice continues. “Tell me how things go tonight-if anything exciting happens with the new blood or if the house explodes while I’m gone.”

“Very funny. If anything interesting happens with the new blood we’ll all hear about it tomorrow evening anyway. Then we can make up for the lack of entertainment tonight. Speaking of which, there’s a production down in Camden I thought we could all go see later this week, a play under the care of a promising new director.”

“Oh? What about?”

“An interesting narrative about online vendettas, shame mongering and seamy exposés.”

“Why would I go see that? I live the same narrative here every night without a computer or clever stage direction.”

As they laugh in unison their footsteps pick up again and continue tracing their original path to the end of the hallway. They turn a corner and Dan listens, waiting until their footfalls and voices fade completely to relax in a slumped heap against the wall. The table mimics his slightly keeled posture with one of its legs currently splintered and warped out of true.

On remembering the comments about Phil however Dan immediately snaps to again, almost knocking the table leg the rest of the way off its fastenings with his knee.

_Phil. Thank fuck he wasn’t home when they came looking for him, but if he’s not there then…where is he?_

He’s sure Phil wouldn’t have abandoned the house in the middle of a storm without a good excuse, certainly not to turn his back on Dan definitively.

…Right?

Eris’s snide comments from the car drift back to him, reminding him that no human would ever possibly want to shoulder the extraordinary burden of living with a vampire for the rest of their lives, especially with all the implied risks of increased scrutiny and danger. Phil was good natured but who was to say, under the right circumstances or the wrong ones, that his nature didn’t have its limits? That pushed far enough he wouldn’t decide self-preservation was better than sticking around to battle whatever unexpected threats were now poised to come his way, be it for the sake of someone he loved and trusted above all others or not? Maybe, after sorting all the financial and bureaucratic headaches incurred over the years through managing a public career, after coping with the complexities of cohabitation and a certain loss of anonymity, after having time to assess the dimpled scars left by Dan’s bite in his arm, Phil had finally decided keeping a vampire for a companion was the deal breaker for what he was willing to deal with in his life.

People change, Eris had said, what makes you think he’s any different?

_No. I’m not letting her get to me. That’s not how Phil is because I know him. Because I believe when he says something he means it and he said he would stay. He’s not about to change his mind so quickly. Teague was with him when I left anyway. He probably just relocated Phil somewhere safe until we can figure out what to do. That’s all it is._

_…Probably. Maybe._

The sudden urge to know for sure is killing him, but without a way to contact Phil all he could do was crouch in the darkness of the alcove, wondering and worrying and staring blankly at the antiquated telephone in front of him.

It takes a moment for his brain to catch up to his eyes and when it does he nearly headdesks the table in realization.

The telephone. Of course.

There’s no time to figure out how much time he even has left, let alone sit here in the dark to place a phone call, but if the plan was to race back home to retrieve Phil and leave together, returning to an empty house devoid of the presence of the one person he was relying on to be there seems like a bad way to risk the rare window of opportunity they had. He needs a new plan, more specifically he thinks, he needs to know where exactly Phil is to figure out what to do next.

He wouldn’t leave the house without his phone. Not when he and Teague probably found it at the front entrance after Eris threw it on the floor. So if he has it on him I can call him and find out where he is and if he’s alright. Now, here’s hoping this thing isn’t just here for the aesthetic.

After listening for the sounds of returning footsteps, Dan fumbles for the receiver and rolls his eyes to the ceiling in relief when he hears the droning buzz of a dial tone in his ear. He’s not sure how people in the not so distant past had enough patience to deal with rotary phones, but with each spinning click and whirr to wait to dial the next number of Phil’s cell, a task made even more tedious by the knots constricting the movement of his fingers, Dan finds himself precariously close to the last thread of his patience. He cradles the receiver between his chin and shoulder as he dials to make it somewhat easier, but restraining himself from exerting too much strength and spinning the dial pad completely off the base and onto the floor feels like more of an effort than it should be. It’s like being transported back to the teeth grinding days of dial-up internet connection. All he needs is the accompanying shriek of electronic static for the full effect.

Finally, after one last passive aggressive swipe and another annoyed roll of his eyes at whoever had the bright idea to install this relic here in the first place, the phone connects. He cradles the receiver closer and hunches down facing the wall, listening to each distant ring in his ear while thinking a silent prayer to no one in particular for Phil to pick up on the other end.

 

 

 

### ❧❧❧❧

There’s a word for everything, Phil thinks. Taking a course in linguistics had only covered a fraction for all of what language could describe and convey through a variety of phonetic sounds and colloquial phrases too numerous to be covered in a university’s syllabus. It might take ages to sort through just how many words could be used to describe one emotion in the English language alone, but Susan appears to be doing a fair job of summing up her current feelings in a succinct explosive burst of one expletive after another, many of them crudely colorful in ways Phil has never heard before.

“Just put it in reverse!” Teague leans forward and waves at the wheel gripped tightly in Susan’s hands.

“What does it look like I’m doing??” She stamps on the gas and the tires give another abortive squeal as they spin uselessly in the mud. “If I keep pushing it any more we’re liable to go arse over tits completely. We’re already too deep in this crap as it is.”

She sighs heavily and shoves herself backwards against the seat, pulling off her driving gloves and smacking them against the wheel. For a moment they all stare with bleak faces at the freshets of water running down the windshield, the wipers churning back and forth in violent swipes across the glass, blurring the spotlighted glow of the streetlamp overhead into dull yellow smears. It’s been ten minutes since the car sank into the dark slush of the embankment on the side of the road after Susan had swerved to narrowly avoid a speeding old Volvo estate going too far over the dividing line between opposite lanes of traffic, straight into the path of their headlights. The tires had sunk into the mud immediately, prompting a string of swears to erupt from Susan’s mouth in a volume more furious and strident than the thunder outside. The Volvo meanwhile had raced away without braking once, even going so far as to offer a nasal blast of the horn as a parting remark to add insult to injury. Susan had watched the disappearing red arc of its taillights in the rearview mirror with an expression Phil imagines would have broken the glass if she’d stared any harder. From there, it’s been a heart sinking ordeal of listening to the engine rev and churn as the tires try to find purchase in the rain clogged mix of earth and grit beneath the treads.

“We’re nearly there. Can’t you-I dunno-try maneuvering it out again like before?”

“It’s not an ATV, Teague. Worst case scenario, I hit a snag and the car turns over with us in it, best case and most likely scenario, nothing happens except the tires just keep digging a deeper trench and then I won’t be able to maneuver at all.”

“So…what now,” Phil asks quietly.

“Now, I’d say it’s time to apply an old fashioned mechanic’s trick for unsticking stuck cars.”

Teague and Phil mirror hopeful expressions as they wait to hear the solution.

“We all get out and push,” Susan finishes grimly.

A crestfallen silence follows this declaration and they all look towards the windshield again, out at the fulminous waterlogged world waiting for them just beyond the car’s dry interior.

“Well, I say ‘we,’ but someone has to stay inside and direct the car from rolling out into the middle of the road for another Volvo with a hot foot to send it flying like a pinball. Problem is, I don’t think pushing this thing is a two person job. We’re in a bad situation and we need proper momentum and leverage to get out. Two people won’t cut it. Maybe not even three.”

“Then, what you’re saying is…” Teague trails off warily, already aware of the implications.

“I’m saying we’re a bit fucked.”

The pronouncement hangs in the air over their heads like a gathering of storm clouds more severe than the ones outside. This was it then. They were stranded only miles away from their destination, stuck in a ditch on the side of the road with the rain pouring down around their ears and no quick means of getting back on their way. The situation does nothing to help the stressful tension collecting between Phil’s shoulders in a knotted coil he isn’t sure even the most skilled chiropractor or masseuse might be able to dislodge. It also doesn’t help to remember Jorin’s warnings about the increasing unlikelihood of successfully enacting their rescue mission the longer Dan spent alone under the Court’s influence. Every minute they waste here, mired and immobile, feels like another minute defeat to Phil, another subtle concession to an anonymous threat he wishes would just go away and let Dan come home. He hasn’t lost faith in Dan’s ability to resist and fight back, but just like before on the train, when he’d been separated from Dan by yawning leagues of silence without an explanation, Phil worries about all the things which could happen, all the ways even the best hopes could turn wrong at the last possible second. Human beings were capable of doing funny things to protect themselves or the ones they love and even if Dan fell under the definition of something other than human, something better or worse than, he was still perceptible to the kinds of foibles and virtues implicit with a nature capable of thinking and feeling like a human. If he felt cornered, alone and threatened, who was to say what decision Dan might ultimately take if convinced he had no other options and no other form of support to fall back on except for whatever bad deal the Court offered? It had to be different when you knew someone had your back, Phil thinks, when you knew someone was there for you, when you could see and feel their presence and be assured of their willingness to take on the world with you, together. No matter if the world in this case happened to be a group of ancient vampires holed up in a mansion in Totteridge. He understood Teague’s and Jorin’s warnings about having no guarantee of walking away from this ordeal unscathed or even having the ability to walk away at all, but he’d started this and he wasn’t about to give up until he saw it through right to the very end, to be with Dan whatever happened, no matter how scared and unsure the thought makes him. However, out of all possible eventualities he’d imagined himself confronting, none of them had involved being run off the road and getting stuck in a ditch.

 _We should have been there by now,_ he thinks, a thought which has circulated about his head the entire time they’d left the tavern, imposing itself with increasing urgency so that it had taken some effort to resist the overwhelming urge to ask, ‘are we there yet?’ every few seconds which passed.

_Now we won’t be there at all._

“Couldn’t we maybe walk the rest of the way?” He looks over at Teague expectantly, still clinging to a shred of stubborn hope. “You said before we were nearly there.”

“Yeah, but we’re not so close we wouldn’t drown beforehand or become walking lightning rods on the way.”

“I could call someone to give us a tow or a different ride,” Susan says, “but that would take at least an hour on a good day and tonight-” A rolling tide of thunder aptly finishes her sentence.

They fall back into a brooding silence. The engine trundles on in a low disconsolate rumble under the thudding sound of rain pouring over the roof. For a moment no one finds anything appropriate to say in the face of not wanting to state the most obvious and painful, that despite all best efforts, they’ve failed right when it mattered most.  
Then, just as Phil begins to settle into the long haul of enduring the churning throb of a tension headache for the remainder of their uncomfortable stay here, without warning, Teague unsnaps his seat belt and reaches for the door handle.

“Fine,” he says. “If a push is all we need to get out of this, _I’ll_ do it.”

Susan frowns. “Right-hang on. Do what exactly?”

“Giving us some proper momentum and leverage, like you said. Just shift it to neutral and keep your hands on the wheel.”

“You’re serious. You want to singlehandedly push us out of here.”

Teague stares at her and the tiny smirk blooming on her face levels out to plain astonishment.

“You really are serious.”

“Look-if it could be avoided I would, but we don’t have a choice anymore. I can get us out of this if you promise to trust me and try not to ask me all the how’s and why’s I can already see you preparing in your head.”

Susan turns away and shakes her head, laughing under her breath. “This is crazy…”

“You’re driving a McLaren in the middle of a torrential storm for a dangerous errand you only know half the details about. ‘Crazy’ is relative at this point.” Teague shrugs and smiles. “Have I ever given you a reason to doubt me?”

“You once told me you thought The Last Airbender was not only a good movie it was seriously underrated.”

Teague coughs self-consciously. “Alright, granted, questionable movie tastes aside, have I ever actually steered you wrong when it mattered most?”

A heavy downbeat of a pause follows and Susan quietly contemplates the metronomic sway of the wipers before answering.

“No…you’re right,” she says. “If you think you can manage it, then, what the hell, go ahead. I’m willing to try anything at this point, but don’t complain about needing physical therapy after you end up with a herniated disc.”

“Not likely. I’m practically indestructible.” Teague exchanges a knowing glance with Phil and as Susan puzzles over the quiet message passed between them, Teague seizes the handle, pushes the door up and out and disappears in a swift streak through the rain to the back of the car.

“Absolutely mad,” Susan mutters. She throws the shift into neutral and waits. For a time there’s nothing but the cold gust of rain and wind swirling in through the open door and the hissing slushed noise of a passing car headed in the opposite direction, going in too much of a hurry to stop or care about their dilemma.

Susan lets out a forbearing sigh and shakes her head. “It’s not that I don’t believe in him you know, but we’ll probably be here for the long haul.”

From outside they hear the intermittent sound of Teague sloshing around the rear bumper of the car, checking the tires and the angle of the ditch to take the full measure of their disastrous situation. Susan watches his murky silhouette in the rearview mirror without saying a word until, as if pressed for confession, she abruptly decides to break the silence. “I’d wanted to tell you before, back when you first asked me about it, but we were in a hurry then and I didn’t know how to best explain it so quickly. Seeing as we’re going nowhere fast, I think now’s a good time as any to tell you it’s Alexandrina Victoria.”

“Who now?” Phil blinks, entirely lost at this sudden announcement.

“My full name. My real name.” Susan pauses and laughs. “Sounds like a cruise liner.”

“It sort of does actually.” Phil smiles, not unkindly.

“Like I told you before, I absolutely hated it, but that’s not why. I mean, it was a mouthful to say when I first started putting words in front of the other and at school you know the way kids are with names more exotic than Mark or Katie- everything becomes a running gag of malicious rhymes. But even that I could take. It was just my mother’s expectations I couldn’t stomach.”  
Susan looks straight through the window, past the runnels of water down the glass and the guttering lightning strikes in the sky. “My family’s the type what’s big on old money, old names, and old proprieties. Never mind we never had enough of the first two to compensate and could never keep up appearances enough for the last, but it’s what they deemed most important and so, when I was born, my mother decided on giving me Queen Victoria’s name and raised me with all the stuffy social expectations of royalty I could never uphold.”

“So you became a car thief instead.” Phil smirks and Susan bends over the wheel in a fit of snorting laughter.

“Yeah, so I became a car thief. I could never be what she wanted me to be and as a teenager I hit my threshold of tolerance. You know how it is sometimes at that age. You don’t quite know who you are yet, but you know all the things you don’t want to be and you get funny ideas about what it means to rebel against the fetters of society until you’re able to find yourself and settle. All I knew back then was I wanted any name that wasn’t my own and I wanted to do anything that wasn’t expected of me. So I became the chaotic hellion instead of the prim socialite. Didn’t make my mother proud, but it made me happy for a time, or satisfied I guess, not really happy. True contentment came after Teague guided all the chaos into something more controlled and healthy where I didn’t regularly hate myself and the world. I dunno…” She looks sidelong at Phil and smiles. “You ever wonder who you might have become if you hadn’t made the decision to be who you are right now?”

“Well, I was close to becoming a veterinarian for a while. Or a weatherman. For a while I just worked at a shop behind the till. I could have been anyone really, but personality wise I think this was always going to be me. A bit wayward and open and slightly weird.” He thinks for a moment and adds, “Alright, more than slightly. Growing up I did think about fitting in. I even wanted to change my name for a while to something cooler sounding, like Zachary or Phil Striker, but later I think my main concern was more about finding ways to make the world fit me instead of me fitting in.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it exactly.” Susan brightens. “I always imagine in another universe I could have been anything. From a teacher or a philosopher to someone obsessed with horses instead of cars or maybe I could have just been a fish swimming round a bowl, if you believe in awkward reincarnations that is. Who knows.” She flexes her hands around the wheel and grips it tightly. “But in this universe, in this current time and place, where I get to be someone who can choose a path and a name for herself apart from what others expect of me, I quite like being Susan. As in, the mechanic Susan; the slightly out of her mind to be driving you two around in this storm Susan.”

“Phil and Teague’s friend Susan,” Phil adds.

She looks at him with quiet considering warmth for a moment and nods. “Phil and Teague’s friend Susan.”

It’s then, without warning, a forceful shove rocks the car hard enough to jolt them both in their seats.

“Holy shit.” Susan reflexively grabs the wheel as another considerable shove moves the car forward.

Phil watches, slack jawed and wide eyed, as the car begins to inch along, the wheels audibly forging a path through tangles of weeds and pools of mud back onto the road. Shaking Teague’s hand and enduring Jorin’s vice like grip had given him a clue as to the kind of incalculable strength Dan now had at his disposal, but to have a working demonstration of that potential in action is more than a bit intimidating. It also conjures up the bizarrely hilarious mental image of Teague propelling the car along the road with the concentrated momentum of Freddy Flintstone, legs and feet moving in a cartoonish whirl too quick to be tracked. Suddenly the opening chapter of Dracula comes to mind in a new light and he wonders if this was what Bram Stoker meant by the line, ‘for the dead travel fast,’ like the more archaic literary version of the internet’s ‘gotta go fast.’ He quickly stifles a sputtering yelp of laughter with the back of his hand at the idea of the count speeding his way down the Carpathian Mountains like a cartoon hedgehog with a purpose and at Susan’s consternated look, silently wondering at what exactly he found so funny, he shakes his head, unable to articulate the joke in a way that would still be amusing once he explained it. A turbulent shake hard enough to throw him forward against the seatbelt locked over his chest sobers him instantly. The car advances along faster and for a moment Phil forgets to breathe, as if he dared not jinx their progress by interrupting the air flow around them, his pulse racing high in his throat as he silently urges Teague on in his head.

_Nearly there, we’re almost out!_

There’s a single terrifying moment when the car sits at a precarious angle half in and half out of the ditch, the rear tires still not having reached the ‘terra firma’ of the road, when Teague’s control of the car apparently slips and it begins to slide backwards despite Susan’s firm stomp on the brakes. She twists the wheel but the tires continue to slide and the world continues to tilt. There’s a terrifying view of the oil dark sky in the windshield as the car pivots to a nearly perfect vertical angle like a rocket set for takeoff and Phil scrabbles desperately at the armrests in an attempt to find anything secure to hold onto. Susan’s worst fear appears a second away from being realized. They were either going to turn over or slide the rest of the way back into the ditch, this time in a more permanent fashion. Phil squeezes his eyes shut, not wanting to see the dizzying view of the sky in the windshield any longer, not when the sliding pull of gravity is enough to twist his stomach into complicated knots. As the car slides back another inch he grits his teeth and holds his breath.

A strangled yell of frustration from outside is the only warning they receive before a colossal shove stops the car’s backwards momentum just in time, throwing Phil forward and jarring the car the rest of the way up and over the kerb, back onto the slick, but blessedly horizontal and ditch free roadway.  
With another muttered curse Phil can barely discern, Susan hurriedly shifts the gear and coasts to a stop along the side of the road to keep out of the path of approaching traffic before throwing on the hazard lights to wait in mystified silence for Teague to reappear.

He does so with all the reckless grace of a jumpscare, darting back into the car with clothing soaked from head to toe with rain and mud and broken stalks of yellowed weeds. Smears of the same decorate his cheeks and forehead like a badly applied face mask. No one says anything for a moment as he slams the door closed behind him and situates himself back in his seat.

“Right. Well, we’re good to go again.” Teague purposefully avoids eye contact with Susan and busies himself with picking off the debris of leaves on his jumper, fumbling for a place to put it before unceremoniously stuffing it in his trouser pocket.

The silence draws itself out further and finally Teague turns to meet Susan and Phil’s awestruck stares.

“What?”

Susan chokes back an incredulous laugh and thwacks Teague lightly on the shoulder. “What do you mean, ‘what?’ Like nothing happened. Like it’s just another weekday night for you. That was incredible.” She pauses. “Too incredible…”

“Was it?” Teague busies himself with the seatbelt, making an extended show of clicking the buckle back into place.

“Teague, come on-”

“You promised.”

“I promised to trust you I didn’t promise to not question the bloody laws of physics.”

“It’s just-a thing I can do.” The buckle snicks into place and he fidgets with the belt instead, pulling and tugging it over his chest in a series of largely unnecessary adjustments. “What, you’ve never heard the phrase big surprises in small packages before?”

“Only in bad dating app experiences,” she says dryly. “You pushed nearly over one thousand kilos of stuck dead weight out of a ditch like it was nothing to you.”

“And you fix cars the same way. Used to rig them with screwdrivers in the driving column to get them to drive just as easily too. We all have our talents.”

“Is that what you call what you did-a talent? Call BGT. I think we have a winner.”

“Alexan-” Teague begins to say in a graveled tone of warning, but cuts off short and shakes his head. “I’m not trying to write you off, but we have somewhere to be. This isn’t the time and even if we had it, I wouldn’t be able to explain it in a way you’d accept.”

In any other circumstance the haphazard mask of flecked dirt on his face would make him look absurd and comical, but when he finally deigns to look up at Susan again, Phil notices he only looks tired, as if years spent lying about what he was or deflecting the topic as best he could so as not to not lose the last true friend remaining to him, had finally taken its emotional toll. It was difficult to hide secrets from people, especially from those one trusted above all others when sharing the secret proved more dangerous than saying nothing at all. Not everyone was willing to accept dangerous truths or the raw nature of a person’s identity, with every small darkness, doubt and flaws of character exposed, revealing all the best and worst of who they were. Phil supposed years living with Dan had been the saving grace towards being able to more easily accept what he had become now. Being able to appreciate every subtle turn of Dan’s habits and moods, the darker thoughts and restless yearnings, the thoughtful silences and louder bursts of laughter; to understand every nuance of what Dan liked, of how he acted and spoke and thought and to know he might never completely understand why- acting as a witness to all the hallmarks of Dan’s character helped deter being put off or afraid by what he had become now. The intrinsic parts which mattered remained the same after all. Behind the feral aura which now accompanied Dan’s mannerisms like a darker double shadow, Phil still recognized the clever, cunning quick witted boy he’d first filmed a video with all those years ago in his old family house when they’d sat on his bedroom floor with an inaugural swatch of cat whiskers on their faces, heralding a time when they’d both been younger and their hair longer, just finding their balance in careers beginning to inch forward towards a future filled with achievements they both could have hardly dared to believe would ever happen at the time.

What they faced now, as strange and terrifying as it was, marked another period of transition they would have to learn to navigate and understand together, just as they’d done before.

 _Being a vampire is at a whole other level_ , he thinks as he watches Teague struggle to look away from Susan’s incisive stare. _I guess it’d be hard to accept the friend you’d known for so long was some kind of monster capable of killing people. Who probably already had killed quite a few…_

Dan hadn’t hurt anyone in his brief timespan as a vampire, but the potential was there, always skulking behind the newfound strength which skimmed under the surface of his skin and displayed itself in the dagger point curve of his fangs. He trusted Dan, but he supposed it might not be so easy for other people when faced with the challenge of assimilating difficult revelations about the people they thought they once knew and even if Susan was already predisposed to trusting Teague, Phil understands why Teague might not be willing to push the boundaries of her confidence to the point of shattering it altogether. In some cases, when there were no simple answers to give, he supposed maintaining silence was better than pushing a difficult lie.

Susan picks up on Teague’s weary frustration and after another searching look at his face with an expression just as tired and worried as his own, she merely nods and says, “Ok. Let’s go.”

The car eases back onto the road, gradually picking up speed and volume through the rain, but over the revving growl of the engine the silence within the car remains uncomfortably tense, each of them picking up on the other’s troubled thoughts like a communal static charge Phil swears he can feel tingling along the backs of his arms. The silence builds and Phil struggles to find something, anything, amusing or interesting to say as a better distraction, but every time he opens his mouth he falls short of a topic which wouldn’t make the situation more awkward than it already was. The tingle of metaphorical static trickles up to his shoulders to circle the nape of his neck like an itchy scarf of anxious thoughts and just as he feels he’s about to open his mouth and blurt out a random fact about frilled-neck lizards, the melodic alert of his cell’s ringtone trills out a timely interruption.

He startles and quickly fishes it out of his jacket pocket with barely enough time to wonder about what to do if the number on the screen turned out to be his mother calling to personally check in on him and Dan. He’d never gotten around to calling her after leaving his family holiday on short notice and although he’d sent a text to Martyn as reassurance it was only a mother’s natural instinct to see for herself that things truly were alright. When he looks down at the incoming caller however, it isn’t his mother or any other number he recognizes.

“Who is it?” Teague peers over, curious.

“Er-no idea.”

“Wrong number then?”

“Maybe…” But as he says it, a crawling sense of urgency tells him it isn’t a wrong number at all and he should pick up. _Now._

A second more of hesitation as his ringtone chimes on and he finally decides what could it hurt to see who it was? His thumb slides across the screen to accept the call seconds before it goes to voicemail.  
“…Hello?”

A moment of silence and then, softly, like an escaped sigh of relief: “Phil?”

_“DAN!”_

Overwhelmed, he leans forward and bellows into the phone startling Susan so badly she narrowly avoids swerving off the side of the road again. The back end fishtails before she recovers control of the wheel, sending a roiling tide of motion sickness through Phil’s stomach, but this time he ignores it in lieu of the familiar voice at the other end of the phone.

“Put it on speaker! Put it on speaker!” Teague gestures frantically as Susan quietly lets out a string of curses between them and Phil follows suit, allowing Dan’s voice to fill the car.

“Well, there go my eardrums. God, you have no idea how good it is to hear your voice. Where are you?”

“That’s my line,” Phil says. “Are you alright? Are you hurt? What’s going on?”

Teague joins in on the string of questions with, “do the Court know where you are now? Are you safe? Did you manage to get away?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa-it’s like opening my inbox and having every message scream at me at once.” Dan’s voice although low and slightly muffled, sounds amused. “So, Teague’s still with you. That’s good.”

“Yeah, of course. Promised I’d help you two, didn’t I? Not about to let him do this alone.”

“Do what exactly? Where are you two?”

“We’re on our way to see you,” Phil says. “Er-assuming you’re still where we think you are.”

A harsh intake of breath and Dan’s voice dips to a distressed whisper. “You’re not actually serious. No, you can’t come here. This place is-you can’t be here.”

“So you’re still at the house?” Teague leans over further and Susan lightly elbows his chest to keep him from leaning too far in front of the wheel.

“Of course I’m still at ‘the house,’ wherever it actually is. It’s like a lucid nightmare of doors, doors and more doors with no way out. I only just managed to find a place to hide and call you on this dinosaur relic of a phone they have here, but it’s only a matter of time before someone finds me if I’m not careful. Hang on-” A pause ensues in which Phil can almost see Dan’s brow furrowing to consider a sudden thought. “What do you mean you’re both on your way here? How are you getting anywhere in this storm?”

“With a bit of help from a friendly stranger,” Susan chimes in.

“Who’s that?”

“Their chauffeur for the moment. I’m an old friend of Teague’s and a new friend of Phil’s. They said they had somewhere to be in a hurry, someone they had to get to before it was too late and I’m helping to make that happen.”

“In what? A submarine?”

“Honestly, that’d be a better pick for a vehicle at this point.” Susan laughs. “But no, it’s just us and a McLaren.”

“Excuse me?” Dan’s voice takes on an incredulous lilt. “Where did –How–what? A _McLaren?_ ”

“It’s er-a long story. I’ll tell you about it later. Or Susan can tell you about it when you meet her,” Phil says.

“Incredible. I leave this guy for one minute and he’s off creating his own Scooby gang.” Even over the phone as Dan speaks, Phil can sense the smile accompanying his words. “How did you know where I was? Or is that a long story too?”

“Sort of. We had some help from a not so friendly stranger,” Teague says.

“Right. Guess we don’t really have time for details anyway. I can’t stay on the phone for long and it’s not that I don’t want to see you, but I mean it when I say this is the last place you should be. I’m trying to get out and when I do, I’ll come to you. Just go somewhere safe, somewhere they can’t find you. Especially not Ashton.”

Teague frowns and leans forward again and Susan elbows his chest away from the wheel again. “Why do you say that? What did he tell you?”

“It’s not what he told me, it’s what I overheard. They’re looking for Phil. He sent people to the house to collect on his debt and if you would have been home….”

He doesn’t finish the sentence but Phil doesn’t need him to, not when he can picture the scenario in his head perfectly. He alone in the flat with Teague, surrounded by the darkness of the blackout and the fury of the storm, to be suddenly ambushed by a mob of vampiric lackeys making good on Ashton’s threat of returning for his owed meal.

 _If I’d been home,_ Phil thinks, _I probably wouldn’t be here talking to Dan now._

Pure dumb luck and his refusal to be anything else but stubborn in his intent to leave the house to find Dan had saved him from an encounter he very well might not have survived.

“Slimy git,” Teague mutters. “Knew he wouldn’t leave it alone. Not when the Court care more about their own interests than their pet stewards.”

“Dan, are you okay,” Phil asks again quietly.

“Yeah, fine. Relatively, I guess. A bit tied up at the moment, but I’m working on it.”

“We’re close. We’re getting to you soon.”

“I already told you, that’s a bad idea. I was able to protect you before, but in this house…I don’t think I’ll be able to pull it off a second time. How do you even expect to get in here? It’s not like you can waltz through the front door.”

“We’re not going through the front door. We’re going in through the basement.”

“Yeah, secret passageways, clandestine tunnels-it’s all good,” Teague adds. “If you can make it down there we could probably meet you and get out before they realize where you’ve disappeared off to.”

“I’ll try, but all the doors are locked and trying to get around is like walking through a maze. A fucking expensive maze. Did your not so friendly stranger guarantee the basement was the safest way out of here?”

“Not exactly,” Teague says, “it’s complicated, but it’s the best bet we have.”

Phil nods, realizing a minute too late that Dan can’t see him. “We’re nearly there. We’re not about to turn back now and Teague’s going with me. I’ll be alright.”

A small leaden chill at the base of his spine, a cold weight of fear that’s dogged his footsteps since leaving the flat, contradicts his optimism, but he figures it’s a white lie he doesn’t need to confess to Dan. The long pause which answers him however says perhaps Dan understood just as well as he did that getting through the night safe and sound was a task easier said than done and ‘being alright’ was a frame of mind they’d both might have to fight for.

“So the rescue party’s almost here then.” Dan sighs in resignation.

“What –disappointed it’s only us?”

“Nah. Well, I’d feel more at ease if you brought a tank with you, maybe Liam Neeson too for good measure, but I guess you’ll do for now.”

“Thanks.” Phil smirks.

“Listen, Phil….if we make it out of this-”

“ _When_ we make it out of this,” Phil corrects him.

“Right. Yeah. When we make it out of this, let’s take that extended holiday to Japan after all. Or anywhere off the beaten track. Just the two of us taking a break from this mess, from the world at large, until we figure out what to do next. You know, find a way to protect ourselves, our families, do damage control until it’s safe to go back home again. What do you think?”

“I’d like that.”

“It’s a plan then. We go back to the flat, throw what we can in a suitcase and buy tickets for the first plane out of the country. To Japan or wherever and take it from there. Maybe I could –”  
A short gasp breaks Dan’s voice in mid-sentence and the line falls silent.

“Dan?” Phil frowns. “ _Dan?_ ”

He brings the phone to his ear and strains to listen as Teague leans over in a rush, draping himself over Susan’s outstretched arms to better hear for himself.  
At first there’s nothing but the fuzzy white noise of background static. Then, another voice, tinny and distant breaks the silence.

“Is someone there?”

 _“Shit.”_ Dan’s voice hisses into the receiver.

“Hello? Who’s there?” The faraway voice sounds closer and before Phil can ask what’s going on, a crumpling racket interrupts the line followed by another desperate high pitched curse from Dan. Silence. Another harsh intake of breath. Then the crumpling sound suddenly breaks off into a distressed squeal of interference that makes Phil jerk his head away. With one final excruciating screech the connection promptly goes dead.

Phil stares at his phone and the disconnected call on his screen. For a moment he contemplates calling back, but if the far off voice was someone in the house who had been on the verge of finding Dan in whatever hiding place he’d chosen, making the phone ring to potentially give Dan away was a bad idea.

_If that voice didn’t belong to someone who’d already found him and that’s why we got cut off._

Phil looks at Teague in dismay, the phone still clutched tightly in his hand and as Teague looks quickly at Susan she interprets the silent plea on both of their faces without needing to ask for clarification. With a rev of the engine and a shift of gears the car picks up speed down the darkness of the road, racing against time and uncertainty to find Dan before it was too late.

 

 

### ❧❧❧❧

He’d grown too comfortable talking with Phil, as was usually the case back when he easily welcomed Skype calls and text messages that spun out into the early morning hours of the next day. Hearing Phil’s voice had been a welcome reprieve from the bleak pompous severity of his surroundings, until he’d lost track of where he was and that he was meant to be hiding and not carrying on in a conversational tone anyone passing the pulled brocade curtain could easily overhear. Complacency and the slight buzz of excitement over the idea of actually being able to leave with Phil had made him careless and it was only after someone had paused in the hallway and called out to him that he’d realized his mistake.

“Is someone there?”

 _“Shit.”_  
Panic seizes his muscles like a vice and his grip tightens on the phone, instantly cracking the thin plated casing of the handle in several places. Phil’s concerned voice issues up from the receiver, asking for him, but Dan only squeezes the phone harder in response as footsteps pad cautiously over the carpet directly towards the alcove.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

No snakeskin oxfords or stilettos come into view this time. Only a pair of unassuming black dress shoes, slightly scuffed and worn, the type a worker like Fergus might wear. The heartbeat however isn’t human, but instead the thin, thready pulse of a vampire. He’d been found and this time there wouldn’t be a chance to use a clever mind trick to make another close escape. Out of ideas, Dan watches on in horror as the silhouetted shadow of the person stopped outside the curtain raises their hand to pull it away.

He’s distantly aware of cracking the phone into several pieces in his fist with a popping crunch of plastic and metal that instantly kills the connection, dropping Phil’s voice off into a void of silence. He’s still holding the twisted remnants of the receiver in his hand when the curtain slides back with a swift rattle and the full light of the hallway falls across his huddled posture on the floor. Déjà vu washes over him and it’s the power nap gone wrong all over again as he locks eyes with the stranger outlined in the glare of the light in the hall and he remains stock still, as if perhaps with enough mental concentration he might be able to blend into the wall and fade out of sight. Just like before however, when he was a teen playing possum under an office desk in the hopes his colleague might forget he was there, camouflage doesn’t prove to be his strong suit and the figure in the hallway, a boy with short cropped hair swept back from a clear brow, appearing to be about the same age and height as him, dressed in the same nondescript black uniform of a domestic worker, continues to stare at him in puzzled silence. After a long stalemate of locked stares, one confused and the other terrified, the boy glances down at the wrecked carnage of the phone clutched in Dan’s hand and the network of ropes lacing his wrists together.

“I _can_ see you, you know…” The boy begins to say, then suddenly, he pauses and his eyes narrow in faint recognition. “You’re the new blood, aren’t you?”

“I-well, that is –“ Dan falters for a good explanation, any explanation to avoid the obvious. “How do you know I’m not with the party?”

He tries for a confident posture, chin lifted in mock defiance, but the boy gives him a pointed look to express, ‘are you serious’ and Dan wilts sheepishly, immediately agreeing with the silent implication that none of the guests in the ballroom looked like something that had just been yanked out of a storm drain with their clothes in disarray and their hands tied in front of them like an escaped convict.

“It’s alright. I won’t hurt you.” The boy puts up his hands, splaying his fingers wide to demonstrate as he purposefully keeps his distance. “But maybe you could not hurt the phone anymore. I think it’s had enough for one night.”

For the first time Dan notices the shredded remnants of the receiver still clutched in his fist and he quickly deposits the remaining shrapnel onto the sagging table before warily standing up from the floor.

“I thought you were with Fergus.” The boy looks him over with a puzzled expression. “Or at least that’s what I heard.”

“I –he took a walk.”

A smirk replaces the boy’s puzzled expression and he laughs. “I’m sure he did. Nice one. Fergus always was the most susceptible to that sort of thing. Probably why he’s been with us for so long despite never having been turned the way he wants to be. The Court just keeps him in thrall enough that he doesn’t question it anymore.”

“So…about the Court…” Dan searches for the right words to make a convincing diplomatic argument in his favor, but the boy continues speaking before he can finish.

“I know. You want to leave, right? I figured you weren’t trying to turn into a chameleon just for laughs.”

Dan startles at the nonchalant way he says it. “You’re not bothered by that?”

“Why should I be? I just work here. I’m not obligated to sound the alarm. If someone wants to leave I won’t stop them.”

“That’s…generous of you. For someone who works for them I mean.”

“If I were a steward I’d be less generous, but I’d rather be considered the hired help than a glorified yes man.” The boy turns his head away and makes a face. “It’s a small margin of difference either way you look at it. Once you join them you’re their property, no matter what title you’re given. But I’m not their watchdog.”

“So if I walk away, you won’t say anything?”

“No. Like I said, I’m not their watchdog or their security enforcer.”

Dan blinks and says nothing, half convinced this was only a ruse and the boy would drag him back to Eris at the first second of dropping his guard.

“You won’t get very far staying here though,” the boy continues. “The others will be leaving the party soon and they’ll see you. If you want to leave you’d better go now. If you know where to go that is. All the exits are heavily guarded and with you looking like that, they’ll stop you before you can even get to the door.”

“I’m trying to get to the basement. Apparently it’s the only sure way out of here.”

The boy frowns. “Thought it was just storage for expensive antiques and wine barrels, but then this house is a honeycomb of old passageways few people know about, so I guess it’s as good a try as any. Not sure if it’s unlocked though. Lucy’s the only one with the key and if it wasn’t left unlocked for the workers fixing the gas lines yesterday then you might be out of luck.”

“Lucy?”

“One of the Court’s stewards. You might have seen her on your way in. She always addresses Eris as ma’am and has a habit of popping into rooms when people least expect it.”  
Dan remembers his grim welcoming party at the door and the woman who had eyed him with silent judgment as he’d followed Eris up the stairs.

“Wait. If she’s a steward, why was she dressed in the same uniform as you and Fergus?”

“Her punishment for being careless or that’s what the Court says, to teach her some humility and discipline. I think it’s more like they find the contrast amusing- a person in Lucy’s highly regarded position going about dressed like a common domestic worker. Humiliation is second to none when it comes to entertainment in here.”

Eris’s speech about diverting nature and applying her own brand of discipline to best suit the Court’s needs comes back to mind and Dan clenches his jaw against an acidic taste like anger coiling at the back of his throat.

“All the guests who stay are given keys to their respective rooms,” George goes on to say, “but Lucy has the keys to unlock those rooms and all the others in this house. The only part of the house she doesn’t have access to is where the Court preside, but I’m assuming that’s the last place you want to be.”

“No kidding,” Dan says. “Even if the door to the basement might be locked, I’d still like to try if it’s all the same.”

“Sure. I can take you there.”

Dan hesitates, keeping the maimed table between him and the boy like a shield, unsure whether or not he should really follow along. There’s no slinking stench of burnt tarmac drifting off of him and nothing in his expression suggests treachery close at hand, but then perhaps not everyone wore their malice as openly as Eris did with the same earnest relish for deceit and chaos. Meeting new people had always been a gamble of wondering what they wanted from him, if they truly valued his friendship or if they merely wanted to use him as a means to an end. Without a way of hacking into the mainframe of a person’s consciousness to see what ulterior motives they hid behind the veneer of a polite smile or practiced words of praise, it was impossible to know who they really were or what they really wanted before it was too late. People’s intentions were hard to read at first glance and in this house where bargaining for power was always part of the game, Dan thinks it might not be wise to trust anyone completely.

_But he knows this house better than I ever will and if I don’t want to end up wandering around on a constant loop of getting nowhere at all I don’t really have a choice but to ask for his help. I mean, he could have taken me to the Court already, but he didn’t, so maybe that counts for something. Hopefully..._

“How do I know you’re not just leading me on?”

“You don’t.” The boy stuffs his hands into his pockets and shrugs again. “It’s fine if you don’t trust me. I wouldn’t blame you. There’s always an ulterior motive to what people do here.”

“Including you?”

“Yes, very often. I’m not a steward, but I have my own agenda.”

 _Of course. Altruism with a catch_ , Dan thinks. _At least he’s honest about it._

“And er…how do I figure in your agenda?”

The boy looks off to the side, checking the hall for passerby or eavesdroppers and his voice dips to a low murmur. ”It’s nothing insidious. At least, not detrimental to you. It’s very simple.” He locks eyes with Dan in a narrowed cunning stare. “I want to be a member of the Court. The only problem is you’ve jumped the line of potential candidates.”

“I never queued up for the position in the first place,” Dan says warily, suddenly aware of the small gap of distance between them as he presses his back more firmly against the wall.

“So I gathered by the bracelets Eris made you. I didn’t expect to run into you like this or at all, but as you’re here I think we can work out a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“What do you mean?”

The boy glances quickly down the hall, checking again to make sure they were still alone. “You want to leave and I want to be where you _don’t_ want to be. Never thought serendipity was actually a thing, but here we are. The Court doesn’t waste the potential for a good asset. Rumor has it you’re one of Yilmaz’s new bloods which makes you a powerful ally or a tool to be used for their advantage.”

“Just feel like a tool in general at the moment.”

“If it were anyone else I’d say they’d kill you straight away. I’ve seen it happen before, but you’re interesting to them. I’d wager they’ll toy with you first before they even consider killing you. They’re good at playing mind games to get their way and if they want you where they can best keep an eye on you, to use you when most convenient, there’s no better seat than right at their side.” The boy smirks ruefully. “You’re lucky. You have an express ticket to the top whether you want it or not. With you here, I don’t have a position to vie for, not with you as the best contender. If you disappear however…”

“The express ticket goes to you. You get to be the one calling the shots instead of the hired help or their ‘yes man.’ ”

The boy shrugs in another reflexive gesture to convey indifference or begrudging assent. Dan can’t tell which it might be, but he thinks perhaps it was both.  
“You make it sound like a chore,” he says. “I mean, for someone who wants to be part of the Court you don’t really sound thrilled about the idea of being here or becoming one of them.”

The boy gives him an eloquent look of pained incredulity. “You think anyone who joins a gang is thrilled to be there? They do it because their options are limited, because they have nothing and no one to give them better alternatives. You work with what you have and when you have nothing like I did, it’s easier to end up in places like this with people like this. It’s just how the system works, even when you’re immortal. The have-nots lose every time unless you get with those who have it all.”

“What about fighting against them? Subverting the system?”

“You really are a new blood, aren’t you? I’m only ten years in the blood so I’m not far behind as a new blood myself, but I’ve already heard all the history of failed coups, all the people that could have resisted the court who ended up joining them instead. Did you know Ashton used to be part of one of the largest rebellion efforts made about two centuries ago?” At Dan’s surprised look the boy nods. “Yeah, and now he’s a boot licker like the rest of them. Rinse and repeat. I get it, you know. They offer you the world and it’s not all bad. You get a working lesson in algedonics here if you like that sort of thing, but even when it’s just sex it’s never just sex. It’s blood, betrayal and power. Like I told you, there’s always an ulterior motive to what happens here, just as it is everywhere.”

“So why put up with it? We’re not completely powerless ourselves and they’re not gods no matter if they want to name themselves after the entire fucking pantheon.”

The boy laughs. “Yeah, they’re dramatic that way, but when you have the uncontested power of a god and all the notoriety to match, they earn the title. No one wants to challenge them anymore. They mess with a person’s life and change the facts just enough to make it so it’s impossible to live in peace, not with them shuffling the pieces to your disadvantage every time, picking and choosing what best suits their own ideas of who you should be for their own amusement; sorting through every intimate part of your life to drain you of every bit of privacy and identity. They make you lose it all if you don’t play nice and they never do, not even when you’re at the top, but at least then you get the chance to be the one pulling the strings instead of having your own pulled every time.”

“There has to be people who don’t agree with that –”

“Everyone’s all talk,” the boy interrupts, waving his hand at the idea as if he were shooing away a bothersome moth. “When it comes down to putting money where your mouth is, everyone’s suddenly broke. No, I’m telling you, it’s worth more being where all the power is. Out there you’re always at the mercy of your typical social vampires. In here it’s the same, but at least you have it all. Protection, leverage, connections –all the necessary stuff you need to survive that only the lucky few ever get to have. When you’re always at the mercy of the system you figure out how to work with it to live. It’s like reliving every bad secondary school experience on a loop, when all the bullied kids learned how to be the bullies, until the ones getting their heads flushed started pulling the levers themselves. It never changes when you become an adult; it’s the same scenario in different forms. You learn to cope with the bullshit and when you can’t, you contribute to it so you never have to be a victim again.”

“You don’t really believe that’s the only option.”

“Show me a better one. I resent it as much as I resent them, but what other choice do I have? I’m here because it’s convenient for me. For you, it isn’t. You clearly have someone or something worth fighting for out there, enough to try and risk everything to get away from them. Those kinds of opportunities are few and far between. I won’t get in your way.”

“Because you want to be one of them.”

“Because it doesn’t matter what I want, it’s just what I need. I don’t have a choice and I’ve already learned fighting is a losing battle.” The boy crosses his arms and shifts restlessly. “So what’s it going to be then? Do you want me to guide you to the basement or you want to go it alone and be caught?”

“Guess I don’t have much of a choice myself…”

“You always have a choice,” the boy says. “Problem is making one is rarely easy.”

Dan says nothing and looks away. He doesn’t agree with the boy’s philosophy but he understands the reason. People had tipping points when they became tired of being used and tired of getting nowhere when they tried to fight back, but there was something bleak about the idea of allowing parasitic dynamics like this one to remain unopposed on the grounds that challenging them would only ensure their propagation. Maybe some things were unavoidable, like bullies in secondary or unfair norms and standards which exclusively preyed on the marginalized and least well off, but that wasn’t to say remaining silent or going along with the flow was better than trying to stop it. Not when it came to the world at large or a secret group of vampires holed up in a sprawling Georgian mansion.

 _But some battles are too big to fight on your own,_ he thinks. _Like now for instance._

In a way both he and the boy were protecting their self-interests, but turning a blind eye to the ever present threat the Court posed was just as bad as pretending he himself wasn’t just as dangerous a threat to himself or to Phil if he wasn’t careful. He still had a score to settle with Eris and he wasn’t about to concede defeat just yet. Confronting dangerous realities was the only way to understanding and dealing with them effectively, but he had no set plan for how to take on a group of vampires more powerful and intimidating than him. For now, saving himself to figure out a better way to handle the Court later was better than blustering his way to ensured defeat with nothing but his own anger and indignation to help him along. It wasn’t easy, but with his own options limited he decides to take the one with the best chance of survival.

“Alright. Lead the way,” he says.

The boy nods and inspects the hall before beckoning Dan forward. “Follow closely behind me then.”

 _I hope I don’t regret this_ , Dan thinks as he leaves the tentative security of the alcove and follows after.

“George, by the way.”

“Huh?”

“My name.”

“Oh. Right. My name is –”

“Dan. I know. I’ve seen you online before.” George glances back over his shoulder. “From internet fame to immortality. Were you born with four leaf clovers sprouting out your ass or what?”

“It wasn’t luck if that’s what you mean. Not like I woke up one day with a small army of viewers. It took work, time- it still does. As for the last part, I don’t know if you’d call it luck so much as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

George turns back towards the hall and continues leading the way in thoughtful silence. “Guess in some respects you were already prepared for dealing with the Court.”

“What do you mean?”

“Catering to public interest is just like the games the Court plays with us and you’re learning how the ground rules change every day to stay on top. You start to figure out where common interest lies until you’re not so concerned about your own interests anymore, only how to keep their attention long enough to keep the lights on at home and survive.”

“It’s not as grim as all that. I don’t do anything I’m uncomfortable with.”

“Maybe, but then again, maybe not. At some point, everyone sacrifices a bit of personal comfort and integrity when it’s most convenient. It’s only natural.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Oh, I think you do. In fact, I think you have an agenda all your own,” George murmurs and there’s something about the way he says it which gives Dan pause. The old familiar ache of irritation blooms its way along his jaw through his fangs and Dan frowns as he halts in the middle of the hallway.

“If you have something you want to say to me, just say it. Or don’t, to be honest. I’ve already dealt with a surplus of opinions on the way here.”

An electric twinge of tension passes through the air between them and Dan can feel the heat of animosity pouring off George in waves like the prelude to a storm more destructive than the one pummeling the house outside although he doesn’t understand why. Before either of them can say another word however they’re interrupted by the sound of approaching voices to herald a crowd of people leaving the party, headed straight in their direction. George moves quickly, forgetting his brief surge of anger and hissing back to Dan, “this way!” as he darts into a hallway filled with a bizarre collection of enormous vases lining the walls on either side like soldiers in strict formation. George grabs the ropes around Dan’s wrists when he doesn’t move fast enough and fairly yanks him behind the rotund bulk of an amphora. He puts a finger to his lips and makes a ducking motion to signal for Dan to crouch down low and keep the top of his head from peeking out in case someone in the group decided to glance down the hallway as they passed.

“See you all next week then? Apparently we’ll be entertaining human guests.” One voice comes into earshot. “The Court’s pulling all the stops this time. Probably some kind of celebration for managing to grab up that new blood.”

“Oh, nice,” another replies giddily. “Always heard the taste improves when you overindulge a human. Someone once told me it was like biting into the most decadent mille-feuille.”

“As if any of us remembers what that tastes like.”

Another voice, a rapid paced sotto with a self-important air joins in. “I keep telling you, it doesn’t matter if you keep them locked in a basement filled with flowers, gold and sweets. The politics of flavor has nothing to do with environment, but whether or not they’re good stock to begin with.”

“And I keep telling you every blood line’s been watered down through the centuries. It doesn’t matter anymore where it comes from. It never mattered to begin with. Blood’s blood.”

“Don’t be such a philistine.”

“Don’t be such a picky cunt.”

Laughter from the group, loud and closing in fast. Dan inches further behind the vase, pressing his back against the wall as he waits for them to pass.

“There’s nothing wrong in having discerning taste,” the sotto voice continues. “Blood isn’t all just blood. There’s a difference. Saying otherwise is just lying to yourself. That new blood for example- bet he tastes incredible.”

“Depends on which taste you mean.”

“I’ll try both and let you know.”

A gale of laughter again, rising and falling as they finally come into view with Dan looking on, his face pressed close to the fine sliver of a gap between the vase and the wall. A gaggle of people in fine suits, costumes and dresses, all glinting with gold and shimmering accents, amble past, too caught up in each other’s conversation to pay a single glance over to the hallway.

Another voice interjects on the conversation with a wry toned challenge. “Oh, please, all this talk about the politics of flavor when you weren’t half as interested in the new blood until I told you he was Yilmaz’s whelp. Then you wouldn’t shut up about him. Suddenly all your big talk of good breeding went straight out the window. You’re never interested in someone unless you think there’s something in it for you.”

“Of course I’m not and what’s the problem? I’m not taking any moral high ground. It’s all grey anyway. Here it’s gilded; and we all enjoy it better when there’s something in it for us. I think that boy and I could work well together. He’s pretty for one and I like pretty people. Makes it easier to cope with his lack of an engaging personality.”

“What makes you think he lacks in personality?”

“He’s a performer, they’re all the same. A lot of hot air, long-winded ideas and soul searing turmoil when they’re not on the stage. They’re like those yappy little terriers you’d sooner muzzle than coddle. Couldn’t put up with them if they didn’t tend to be easy on the eyes. And he’s got Yilmaz’s blood, which evens the odds a bit more in his favor. Or mine really.”

“So he’s a pretty toy with a purpose.”

“All the best toys are.” The sotto voice croons and a wave of knowing chuckles answers him. “If he gets in good with the Court we could help each other out. He scratches my back, I bite his.”

“So confident of yourself. What if he doesn’t like you?”

“How could he not like me? Look at me. He should be flattered by my interest in him. I don’t like most people and I’m not shy about letting them know it.”

“Because he’s not only a picky cunt, he’s an instigating one too.” The first voice in the group who had spoken retorts with a laugh. “Well, if you’re set on getting in that boy’s good graces then prepare for competition. We all want a fast ride to the top with him.”

“Some of us would settle for just a ride,” another voice says.

Their tittering laughter fades into the distance, but George waits until the slow throb of their heartbeats fades away before daring to move. When all becomes still again, he cautiously slinks away from their makeshift cover behind the vase, peers to the end of the hall and signals for Dan to follow.

“It’s alright. They’ve gone.”

Dan straightens up but remains where he stands with his spine half slumped against the wall, struggling to throw off the queasy feeling brought on after hearing himself discussed with the cold practicality of investors comparing high-yield stocks. He certainly was the popular one here and the grab bag of opinions about him appeared to be as numerous and varied as the vases parading down the hallway. The more he plays accidental eavesdropper to the conversations in this house the more anxious he becomes to leave, before he found himself among the guests trawling the halls with eager hunger, looking for his own new blood to play with in exchange for pride and power. Ambition wasn’t an alien or unwelcome concept to him. He wasn’t without the fierce drive for success in all he strived to accomplish, but he liked to think his motivations would never evolve to using someone like an object to be tossed away after its use was expended. In movies and TV programs there was always something delightfully intriguing about well written antagonists with darker intentions who expertly plotted and schemed and manipulated the world around them with artful cunning, but to see its working example up close and personal instead of within the abstract confines of fiction is unsettling. To find himself the object of that cunning is even more so. The consistent threat of being manipulated or becoming the manipulator remains the best inspiration in his decision to leave and he’d haul ass without further question, but his previous unfinished conversation with George lingers in the air between them in an uncomfortable bubble of awkward silence.

“Sorry about before.” George finally breaks the stiff tension and considers his own warped reflection in a vase along the opposite wall instead of meeting Dan’s eyes. “That thing about agendas- just forget it. Whatever your incentives are in life, they’re your own. If anything, I’m bitter and taking it out on you.”

“Bitter about _what?_ ”

“You really want to know?” George turns to face him and Dan’s taken aback by the livid fury simmering in his stare. “There are people who have to work twice as hard to get anywhere in life, people like me who try and try and end up getting nowhere close to where they want to be. Then some people are handed the world and squander every opportunity just to become another bad version of the Court themselves.”

The smell of frustration on him is low and musty, like a dust choked attic starved of light and air for decades. “You have so much to go back to,” he continues. “Eminent fame, a network of friends, now you’re a vampire brimming with strength and blood given to you by the most feared and respected among us, so sought after as a matter of fact, even perfect strangers are lining up for a turn with you whether you care for the attention or not –you have so much and the only thing I have to go back to is more of this.” He flaps a hand at the empty hallway and Dan knows he doesn’t mean the assembly of odd décor or the guests who had just left the party, but the minefield of a social atmosphere pervading the entire house. “Why do you get to be fortune’s favorite? Out of everyone else trying to be where you are, to have what you have, why is it _you?_ ”

“You don’t think it’s fair, you mean. You don’t think I deserve it.” Dan fills in the blank of the implied suggestion hanging over his head.

“I don’t know what people deserve. I think there are people who have much more than they appreciate or understand, who don’t attempt to understand it or improve it. You gave up a degree and incredible potential just to perform for people, to be some pantomimed caricature of what people think you are instead of who you really are. Exactly what it’s like to be with the Court.”

“So what –you think I should have accepted the Court’s offer? That I should drop the videos I make and focus on being some highbrow film maker instead? Because otherwise I’m wasting my time and by association yours? I don’t understand what you want from me or why this is such a serious issue for you.”

“I know you’re running away from here back to the same scene with a different name,” George says. “It’s hypocritical. I don’t understand it. In fact, I hate it. Like I said, I’m not going to stand in your way if it’s what you want to fight for, but I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t piss me off either.”

“Hey, not being a piano virtuoso pisses me off sometimes too, but I’m not standing outside Royal Festival Hall telling the Philharmonic’s wind section they wasted their talent on the clarinet instead of the piano just to make me feel better about not being at the same level they are. No one has a set path for how to live their life. Back in uni I thought there was. Thought I had to slog through classes and exams to land a career, secure a paycheck, make a family, get a house, invest in a pension-the typical blueprints you’re meant to follow if you want to prove yourself a successful member of society. But halfway through a premature mid-life crisis I realized there is no set path. It’s all just a process of developing a self-concept independent of popular opinion; of finding what works and what doesn’t and I’ve found what I do, how I live, works for me. It doesn’t mean I’m not struggling to make peace with certain things or I’m not still trying to figure out what to do next or how, but it’s my life and I like it better when I lay the groundwork for how it evolves instead of listening to someone describe all the ways I failed at being me because it’s not what they would’ve done themselves. I don’t know anything about being ‘fortune’s favorite’ and I’m definitely nothing like the Court.”

“Maybe. If you were, I wouldn’t expect you to admit it, but you ever think about what you’ve been given? All the acclaim and power? You have millions of people looking at you online and you give them makeup challenges and hyperbole. You don’t even have to try, do you? It’s like the stewards and beloveds of the Court who never have to face being called the ‘hired help.’ They can play with their good luck all day, never take a hard look at what they’re doing or why. Everything is an easy ride for them while people like me struggle to survive and be taken seriously.”

There are a number of points in George’s impassioned rant Dan would ordinarily pick apart to the nth degree of detail, to waylay all accusations and better understand the reasons behind them, but with his brain primarily wired for escape, the inclination to explain himself is growing thin. He doesn’t know the extent of George’s beef with him or how the theme of his videos could induce that much idle enmity to the point of being compared with Eris and her cohorts, but in the same way he was growing less inclined to be self-explanatory, Dan isn’t in the mood to ask George to explain himself either. He realizes he’s started biting his bottom lip again with the aggravated preoccupation of a feather pecking battery hen. The pain is sharp and worrying, an automatic habit he knows he’d better learn to break, but there’s no time to think about it now. Instead, he searches for something to say, something more articulate than the bright pulse of too many thoughts and abstract emotions swirling about his head, to make George forget his brooding hang ups and continue leading the way to the basement before his stewing frustration made him change his mind about being a willing accomplice or another group of exiting revelers found them.

“Look...perceptions have a way of being distorted when you’re looking in on someone else’s life from a distance. Nothing about this has been an easy ride. Not any of it.” The words come slowly, carefully and the needle sharp twinges in his lip color his tone with a restrained edge as he tries to avoid the snap reply he’d rather give. “Just because I don’t take a formal straight laced attitude to everything about my life or my career doesn’t mean I’m not serious about it or that I’ve never struggled with it. I don’t know what you think I should be doing or what responsibility you expect me to fulfill, but I’m not exactly waiting around to be hailed as the next Jean-Luc Godard, okay. There’s plenty of people who will never take what I do for a living seriously, not even if I did drop everything to become some highbrow filmmaker. Hell, I don’t know if I want to take my life as a whole seriously when so much about the universe tends to take humanity as a joke anyway. Guess it’s better to laugh, find irony in the darker moments and keep on trying for something better. But I do try, I do care and I don’t take what I have for granted. And as for all the rest of it- those people, this house, all the newfound attention and criticism I never asked for- “ Dan brusquely waves his hand to the side and accidentally catches the side of the vase next to him with a ringing hollow thwock like a punched church bell making George jump. “I could give a fuck. I could do without it. Apparently, once I’m gone, you’ll inherit all that in my place anyway. Soon, you’re the one who’ll be better off than me.”

“Yeah. Of course. That’s the plan, isn’t it.” George’s tone is flatly cynical, but more reserved. He swipes his hair back from his forehead, still visibly agitated but in a distracted way that was no longer fixated on Dan as the source of his grievances. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time. It’s not that I don’t want you to have what you have, it’s that I don’t know why I couldn’t have it too. I look at you, see what you are, what you could be and I look at myself and wonder what my life could have been if I had a tenth of what you do, what I could have done with all that opportunity and potential, so I’d have a good reason to not stay here.”

“Not becoming one of them is always a good reason,” Dan says quietly after a moment. “You don’t have to stay. You could escape as well. You’re trying to place yourself in my shoes, trying to see what you would make of my life if you were me and you can’t do that. No one can. You want a life of your own to live how you want, you have to get out of here first to make it happen, not hold me to a personal standard I don’t care to meet and never will. That whole thing about fame, so called ‘network’ of friends –it’s just a byproduct of keeping with something I wanted to do and being in the places I wanted to be; making the best of circumstances I was given. Being bitten by some alpha class of vampire, that’s just a byproduct of being forced into a situation I wasn’t prepared for. Even now, I don’t know what the hell I’m meant to be doing, how I’m meant to go about being ‘this.’ Bad enough I only had a general clue about being a human. It’s not a matter of luck, it just is and now I’m left trying not to make a complete clusterfuck of it.”

George says nothing and continues to stare ahead into the middle distance in grim contemplation.

“I can’t tell you what will work for you,” Dan goes on quickly, uneasy at the idea of being caught out in the open trying to give George the impromptu pep talk he appeared to need. “I don’t know your story or your experiences, but staying here, trying to gamble on the off chance that joining the Court will be better than being your own person, doesn’t have the best odds of a good payout in the long run and neither does brooding about all the stuff that could have been if only you were able to live anyone else’s life but your own. You want to live, but I mean really live for yourself, then you need to leave.”

At first, there’s no response and George remains pensively still and detached. Thankfully there’s no more sign of approaching voices or heartbeats, but every second they waste out here in the hall raises the risk of being found and Dan’s unease starts to replace the ache of irritation with desperation instead.

“No.” George sets his jaw and swallows hard around the word. “I’m staying. I’ve already come too far to start over from the bottom again for nothing. You’re right. We have to make the best of the circumstances we’re given and I was given this one chance and I’m taking it, just like you. So, let’s go.”

Without waiting for a reply, he sets off down the hall again at a sharper pace and Dan quickly snaps to, trying to keep up. He isn’t prepared for the winding path they follow, down more expansive hallways filled with yet more locked rooms and opulent décor crammed along the walls. More oil portraits follow their progress as they pass and Dan wonders if some of the figures caught in the swirled textures and broad strokes might depict other members of the Court, but he’s too disturbed by the way their eyes track his movements to take a second glance. He supposes one day in the future maybe George’s own portrait might one day hang there, leering out from a gilded frame with the same eerie expression of knowing malice. Or maybe he might just find himself in a locked room of his own, gorging on blood without restraint, in thrall to the Court just like Fergus while never being one of them. Neither prospect sounds like a happy fate, but with George already determined to stay, changing his mind would take extended time and effort to convince him otherwise.

 _And then he’d have to decide on his own to leave. I can’t make him, no matter what I could say_ , Dan thinks. _Just like Phil decided to stay with me. Because he wanted to. Just how I’m leaving now, because I want to. Now we’re both dealing with our decisions and I guess George will have to do the same too._

Dan tries not to think about it too hard. There’s already enough on his mind with Phil’s impending arrival and trying not to worry what might happen if someone in the house with less generous intentions than George found him before Dan could, especially if that someone turned out to be Ashton.

After another series of hallways, rooms and evasive maneuvers that would have come in handy years ago on the soggy football pitch at school, they manage to avoid detection and finally turn into a narrow passageway leading off to a dead end punctuated by a single large blue door.

“That’s where the basement leads.” George motions over to it, gesturing to the hulk of the lock under the handle, exactly like that of a hotel’s slotted key card system. “It’s the only part of the house based on a digital system like this, other than where the Court is of course. Every other room is a traditional key. Old fashioned, like loads of things in this house.”

“So I’d noticed, “Dan says, remembering the rotary phone he’d inadvertently crushed.

“It’s not all archaic. They have alarms outside the grounds and around the house, so it’s safe to assume barging your way in will set off an alarm too. But as I said, Lucy deactivated it temporarily for the repair crew to keep from having to constantly retrieve the key every time one of them needed to leave, so maybe it’s still…”  
George walks up to it and cautiously reaches for the handle. Dan waits, watching with bated breath. Hope is a fragile creature in his mind and he tries not to rely on it too heavily, but a fluttery lightheaded sensation of frantic yearning roots his stare to the spot as George grasps the door knob. It yields easily in his hand, turning with a smooth click of bolts receding back into the faceplate and with a small push the door swings open quietly.

“Oh fuck,” Dan sighs, too weary to express his relief with proper enthusiasm. He has no sense of triumph this time. Now he’d simply like to leave, reunite with Phil and be about the business of returning home.

A cool draft swirls up from the stairs leading down into the dimly lit shadows beyond the door and the small breeze feels good on Dan’s cheek as it wafts by. It’s a promise of freedom, of leaving behind this house and its heavy burdens for good. George follows his gaze down the stairs and Dan wonders if he might be contemplating the same idea of escape.

“You said before life was just a process of developing a self-concept independent of popular opinion,” George says slowly, “of finding what works and what doesn’t, but how can you develop a healthy self-concept when we’re all just mirrors of everyone else’s bad imitations? Struggling to meet popular expectations of what’s socially condoned or demanded to survive even if it’s not who we really are?”

Dan takes a moment to consider what George means before replying. Leaving didn’t guarantee an easy road to victory, not when the Court wasn’t just exclusive to this house or to London itself. The implications of its ethos were more far reaching and universal in nature. The world had its own Courts of sneering critics without fangs or lavish riches to distinguish them. Some were more insidious than the Court itself, more limiting and detrimental to a person’s health. Early on in life he’d expected the tenets for survival revolved around the usual rules of common sense and decency towards other human beings- just be courteous, be willing to understand and listen, avoid harming others and learn as much about the world and yourself as possible. He’d thought these things would make life easier to navigate, but once thrown into the buzzing throng of an all-boys school, most of whom had a chip on their shoulder and a reputation to prove, he’d found possessing an attitude of benign good will, on par with all the Winnie the Pooh episodes he’d watched as a child, wasn’t tolerated in an environment where more physical displays of aggression and unprovoked ridicule demonstrated a person’s worth. It would have been easier to cop to with the status quo and avoid the unwanted attention that came with being singled out as a target rather than a compatriot, but he’d found a rare kind of satisfaction in the instances where he shrugged his shoulders and opted for being strange and funny and only himself. It hadn’t impressed the hive mind of bullies around him, all of them too caught up in their own insulated world of troubles without an outlet other than aggression to express them, making self-acceptance and individuality difficult concepts to reconcile with. In those hectic days of adolescence he’d soon learned by experience that all acts of independent thought came at a price and nothing in the world which could be acted upon existed without a challenge to meet it. It had been up to him to decide how much he valued being his own person over being what others wanted him to be, if only to avoid the conflict incurred from being someone different.  
Ultimately, it would be the same for George to decide which he was willing to cope with, to advance down the stairs or remain where he was. Both signified irreversible decisions with consequences he’d have to live with and Dan empathizes with his struggle to make the right choice. He’d found a better point of comparison in people willing to understand and accept him, in Phil who welcomed all the vagaries of his personality even at its darkest, weirdest and distant, even now when that personality had evolved to encompass feral instincts and a new indulgent hunger. Not everyone had such open displays of support and encouragement to help them along and although solitude had its benefits, sometimes it was tougher to understand what to do when you were alone without trusted systems of support to grant a better perspective on life when your own was too muddled and painful to see clearly. In the absence of trusted voices, in a house surrounded by contemptuous ones instead, George was looking to him as a clarifying arbiter of reason. The responsibility is daunting and Dan’s not sure he should be the one appointed as advisor to anyone’s subconscious, but folding his arms and telling George to just ‘figure it out, mate,’ sounds too callous, especially when Teague easily could have done the same on their first meeting but instead had extended his help to Dan without hesitation and then done so once more with Phil despite the present threat of being targeted by the Court as an irritant and a traitor.

George looks on expectantly, as if hoping for an answer persuasive enough to convince him starting over might be a better option after all.

 _He’s right,_ Dan thinks. _We all have a choice, but making one isn’t always easy._

“I don’t know what’s right for everyone,” he says. “I just know what worked for me and it’s not like I didn’t try to imitate what I thought was the most successful, most attractive traits in the people I admired. I mean, as infants we all literally start out copying what we see when we don’t have enough experience to try something different or think for ourselves, but even then, eventually, we start to make up our own minds for how to do things, to make conclusions about who we are and how we relate to the world.” He becomes self-conscious about waffling his way through an answer more complex than he has the time to construct in more detail and aggravatedly passes a hand through the rumpled mess of curls on his head. “Look, right. I’m no philosopher; I don’t have any revolutionary theories about how to approach the world. The only thing I know for sure is freedom and identity go hand in hand when it comes to finding out who you want to be and how you want to be defined, on your own terms, without anyone telling you who you are. Out there you have a chance to try it for yourself. In here you never will.”

“I have a feeling even if I do make it out, I’ll never be like you. I’ll never achieve what you have or be half of what you are, luck or not.”

“Good,” Dan replies and George looks at him sharply. “Don’t be like me. I wasted fuck knows how many hours thinking I wasn’t good enough to be anything because I wasn’t at the level of people who seemed more successful and cooler than me. I still get like that. Everyone does I guess. Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself they do to make me feel better about not having a handle on my capacity for envy yet, I don’t know- you and I both already understand nothing’s easy. Getting credit as an individual, feeling comfortable with _yourself_ as an individual, takes time and sleepless nights, but personally, I’d like to think it’s worth all the trouble in the end.”

“You really believe that.”

Dan thinks of his old brown bedroom where he’d once hit record on a laptop stacked high on a tower of textbooks and DVDs, introducing himself with the hesitant fervor that came with starting something new and not knowing what might happen next, back in a time when he was full of too many ambitions and only one vague idea for how to merge them all into a common interest. He thinks of Phil, his own arbiter of reason who had convinced him to try when he wasn’t sure if editing videos was really anything he could ever become properly good at, Phil who had quickly graduated from long distance motivator via Skype to inseparable part of his life; who had tolerated his energy and passion to the point of dedicating the time and effort to merge their careers into a dynamic in which they were both acknowledged as two separate but integral units of a whole, one in which Dan continued to feel daily vindicated in his choice to deviate from the norm and pursue something unexpectedly different. He’s not sure what his younger self might think to know how far he’d come; how much further he was looking forward to go if given the chance, and as he considers whether it had really been worth all the trouble in the end, it’s not at all difficult for him to look George straight in the eye and say, ‘yeah, I do.’

George says nothing at first and looks down into the darkness at the foot of the stairs, face angled into the slinking draft’s promise of escape.  
“I think…” he begins slowly, thoughtfully. “I think I’ve changed my mind. I think I’m –”

“Well, look who it is. This certainly has biblical overtures doesn’t it? Daniel in the lion’s den.”

The interrupting voice is immediately familiar, the smarmy inflection instantly grating and before Dan turns in startled unison with George, he already knows who will be standing right behind them like a piece of bad news he’d rather not have to deal with.

When he looks, true to form, the dandyish, smug grinned figure of Ashton is standing right behind him, flanked by the more diminutive silent specter of Lucy. She looks distinctly unhappy to be there and the glower on her face looks more to do with being in Ashton’s presence from the way she looks aside at him with barely repressed tolerance as he speaks- a feeling Dan thinks is entirely mutual. Ashton’s supercilious expression hasn’t changed at all since the first time they’d met. Like the rest of the party goers upstairs he’s dressed to the nines in a tailored Italian cut suit made of lilac fabric with a satiny sheen, an orchid boutonniere and glossy pointed tip shoes to match. His entire aesthetic is strangely pleasing to look at, like a pastel filtered photo of soft tones and muted accents completely at odds with the grating harsh edged manner of the person wearing them.

“I didn’t realize you were authorized to give tours.” Ashton’s eyes narrow as he considers the propped open basement door and the handle still clutched firmly in George’s hand. “Much less tours into restricted areas.”

Lucy mirrors his suspicion and stares between them silently. Dan has no idea how they’d managed to appear without neither he nor George noticing, but he remembers how Lucy had managed to take Eris of all people by surprise and supposes maybe it was just a latent talent for stewards to materialize from the ether without warning. He only hopes they hadn’t been shadowing them both the entire way here, listening in on their conversation, although he doesn’t think it’s likely they would have waited to interrupt until now. If asked to describe the extent of his shock Dan would have found no other apt metaphors for the situation than to say it felt like his heart was currently shitting itself out of pure fear from being caught, but before he can recover, George relinquishes his grip on the doorknob and steps forward to address Ashton before the prolonged silence could incite his suspicious expression even more.

I found the new blood waiting alone in the hall. Fergus was supposed to be with him but it looks as if he went off on his own errand instead. I came here to see if he might have gone to the basement searching for another sip of wine as he likes to do whenever he can manage it, but the door is locked.”

Ashton and Lucy exchange a slow glance and for a moment Dan thinks they haven’t bought the ruse one bit, not with the imperious tilt of their chins suggesting skeptical disdain at the explanation. Then-

“You forgot to lock it again, didn’t you? You really are the most inefficient creature.” Ashton sniffs and Lucy, immediately affronted, shakes her head in a bouncing froth of curls.

“Don’t go mooing at me about forgetting everything when you can’t remember to be cunning enough not to be outwitted by some new blood neonate,” she snaps.

Ashton falters and quickly brushes off the insult. “And how is the new blood enjoying the tour so far? What it’s like to see how the other half live for a change?”

Dan shrugs. “It’s not much. I saw a suite in Vegas once that was nicer.”

“You’re comparing all _this_ -” Ashton makes a broad gesture in the air to include the entirety of their surroundings, “to a common hotel?”

“You guys have the lock systems and tacky carpeting to match, didn’t seem like a bad comparison.” He raises an eyebrow and Ashton fumes as both George and Lucy watch them, mystified by the exchange.

“…You think you’re smart,” Ashton seethes. “You think you’re above us, don’t you?”

“No. I just don’t like this place or any of you. Nothing personal really. Although, seeing how I was essentially kidnapped here, it kind of is.”

“Kidnapped by Eris, no less. You should be grateful she wasted the effort on you at all. By the way, I thought you should know. Your friend-the one you tried so valiantly to save from me, the reason you’re here in the first place-is gone.”

Dan instantly realizes the bait for what it is and remains quiet, knowing Ashton was clueless about Phil’s true whereabouts.

“Oh? You’re not worried? You went through so much trouble for him and in only a matter of a few moments he’s been removed from your life.”

“Yeah, it’s okay,” Dan says. “Phil’s a resourceful guy. Wherever he is, I’m sure he can take care of himself.”

“Who said he was alive?”

“I know he’s not dead.”

“Are you a fortune teller now on top of being the Court’s favorite?”

“No, just more cunning than you apparently, according to her and most everyone else in this house.”

Ashton draws himself up in a livid rage, his cheeks flushing to purple balloons. “How dare–!”

“Oh shut it, will you?” Lucy wrinkles her nose at him. “We don’t have all night for you to get your wounded pride more bent out of shape than it already is. He _is_ more cunning than you. Just accept it.”

She turns her face away to look at George, leaving Ashton sputtering with inarticulate outrage. “So it’s Fergus again as usual. Should have known. Won’t be long now till he becomes a grey haired nuisance, unless the masters decide to grant him his severance early via severed limb for his carelessness tonight. Or me as well for that matter. Then there’s this problem...” She glances over to Dan wearily. “He was supposed to be ready by now. Eris will be furious.”

“I can take him.” George feigns a perfect attitude of casual indifference and Dan realizes he’s playing for time, trying to convince Lucy to leave them alone so they could try their hand once more at escape. “I’ll make sure he arrives where he’s supposed to.”

“I suppose…” Lucy begins to say with a lazy drawl to indicate it was all the same whoever took charge of the new blood as long as it wasn’t her, but she cuts herself short and her green eyes snap wide with dawning horror and apprehension. George and Ashton mirror her, both of them going deathly silent and still. Dan has time to wonder what exactly had gone wrong this time before he hears its sauntering approach down the hall.

Eris.

The sharp sound of her heels on the floor and the signature blood red swathe of lipstick staining her smile is unmistakable. Dan’s heart meanwhile has graduated from ‘shitting itself’ to stopping altogether. That’s it. He’s done. Whatever small window of time he’d been afforded has officially expired and as Eris closes the distance down the hall with a predator’s slinking mien, Ashton’s biblical allusion to the lion’s den takes on new meaning.

“Am I interrupting something?” She comes to a stop before them and waits for an answer. When it isn’t immediately forthcoming, she raises an eyebrow and looks between the four of them in amusement. “No, please, don’t stop on my account. I’d hate to think I was the kill joy of the private party you’ve all arranged down here.”

George, Ashton and Lucy all begin speaking as one in a faltering mess of convoluted explanations which Eris silences at once with a raised hand.

“Let’s try again and this time a little less like a press conference in a chicken coop,” she says. “I leave the Court to find Daniel in the dressing room where he should have been, only to find him down here on a secret expedition with the three of you. Took me some time to find you all by the way, so I’m not in the best mood for bad excuses. Even vampires get tired of wandering the house in heels.”

 _Try Uggs next time?_ Dan thinks automatically and something of his smug retort must show on his face because George shoots him a warning glance.

“Well? I’m guessing there’s a reason for why he still looks like a hobo in pyjamas.”

“It’s Fergus, ma’am,” Lucy begins quickly. “He went off on his own. George found the new blood and came to see if perhaps Fergus had absconded downstairs as per his usual habit.”

“But the door is locked, is it not?”

Exchanged looks pass between them like a wildfire, but no one speaks.

“Well?” Eris asks again and her voice is a low prelude to unpredictable danger. “Isn’t it?”

“Ma’am, I-”

“Or did you forget to lock it before, allowing him access? You did it twice already, maybe you forgot again. Maybe Lethe has competition for the most addle brained person in this household. You did leave it unlocked, didn’t you?”

“The workers left so late yesterday, close to dawn. I thought it might be alright if–”

Eris advances on Lucy and her head dips low in the suggestive angle of a lover about to proffer a kiss, but she stops just short of Lucy’s mouth, lips hovering a breath away as she cups Lucy’s chin in one hand. “But it’s not alright. Not at all. And now I have to deal with not only an incompetent human servant but an incompetent vampire steward as well.” Her nails dig into the skin with a dimpling pressure Dan can still feel imprinting his lip.

“You should know better.” The nails curve deeper like hooks and Eris’s mouth roves the minute gap of air between her lips and Lucy’s. “But you’ll make amends won’t you? When I leave here, you’ll check to make sure Fergus isn’t downstairs emptying the wine barrels as we speak. You’ll look through every room of that cellar ensuring no one and nothing moves except mice and your own poor shadow. You’ll do that for me, won’t you?”

Dan can’t see the points of Eris’s nails anymore as they disappear further into the skin.

“Come on, Lulu. I’m waiting for an answer.”

“yesofcoursema’amrightawayma’am.” Lucy squeaks out the answer in a garbled rush, struggling to keep her head high in the air, away from the skewering pressure of the nails hooked under her chin.

“Fantastic.” Eris whips her hand away and Lucy backs away with a gasp, clutching at her throat. “And you, Ashton. You’ll go with her.”

Ashton once more draws himself up with indignation at the idea, possibly imagining his precious suit and shoes becoming ruined in the accumulated dust to be found in the basement below. “Eris, if I may, it hardly seems fair I should be included when this problem is entirely her fault. Pure, unthinking carelessness-“

“And I think it’s hardly fair for you to come crying to the Court for us to take care of a problem you should have resolved yourself. I could excuse the weakness of character for it netting us Yilmaz’s whelp, but then there’s the matter of the little envoy you sent to the new blood’s house. That’s right,” she murmurs at Ashton’s startled expression. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out? You, risking our resources and the possibility of exposure; acting without our authority or counsel? One would think you’re planning a coup next.”

“No, no, of course not. I would never think –”

“You never do,” Eris finishes. “But as a demonstration of your goodwill and continued dedication to us, you’ll go with Lucy to help her without questioning me again. You’re good for this much, yes?”

“Yes, of course. I-I’ll go.”

“As for you, George- thank you for your timely intervention. It’s nice to know incompetence hasn’t become a widespread epidemic in this house.” Eris turns to him and George gives a hasty bow.

“Ma’am, if you prefer I can save you the trip of having the new blood dressed appropriately and take him there myself, as I was telling Lucy before –”

“It’s too late for that now. He’ll go as he is. They already think I’m stalling to secretly influence him to side with me against them. Imagine? _You_ wanting to join with _me?_ ” She looks at Dan and laughs. “I think you’d sooner try to kill me, wouldn’t you?”

“Probably,” Dan blurts out and George stares at him.

Eris laughs again and the drifting smell of burning tarmac rises around her. “Of course you’d try, just like that little stint in the car. Which the Court found adorable by the way when I told them. But as I said, given some time and discipline maybe you’ll reconsider being enemies. For now, you can meet the Court yourself and we’ll see how that smart mouth avails you this time.”

Dan for his part begins to wonder the same thing.

“George, you’re with us,” Eris says abruptly.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’ve been interested in how we operate for the longest time, haven’t you? You’ve wanted to be a part of the Court since you came begging at our door months ago, looking for shelter and work. This will be a good learning experience for you. Consider it a small reward for your good effort tonight. Unless you’d rather join those two on their Easter egg hunt.”

“I- no.” George shakes his head, his stare trained deliberately at the floor. “I’ll come with you.”

“ _Outrageous-!_ ” Ashton blurts out the beginnings of a protest to this idea, but Eris turns her head and directs a look so dark and baleful, Ashton swallows the rest of his words and whirls around in a meek scurry towards the basement door with Lucy following right behind him.

Eris watches them leave with fierce satisfaction before she hooks her nails into Dan’s shoulder to lead him down the hall. Once more her strength overpowers him and he’s forced to lean forward in a hunched posture like a child being led away by their ear to prevent from having his shoulder yanked out of its socket. The discomfort momentarily distracts him from the thought of Phil making his way through the cellar only to run into Ashton and Lucy, but it’s not a distraction which lasts for long when he glances back to see the door closing firmly shut behind them. He shares a brief look with George who gives him a quiet dismayed expression of his own before turning away.

“ _I told you, fighting is a losing battle,_ ” that expression says and even with the nails burning his shoulder like sharp firebrands through his shirt Dan thinks, _no. No it’s not. As long as I’m alive, it’s not. Teague is with Phil so it’s not as if he’ll run into those two alone. And by what George said before, the Court won’t try to kill me just yet. I still have a chance to get out and get to Phil. I can do this. I will do this._

_I hope…_

He’s guided back through the winding halls George had just lead him down, retracing their steps past the creepy leering portraits and the menagerie of oversized amphorae, up a winding staircase to the second floor, to finally stop short in front of a monstrosity of a mirror mounted on the wall. It boasts a gilt wood frame brimming with people, animals and sinuous filigree work wrapping around its entirety like the menacing tendrils of a deep sea squid. It stands about nine feet tall and seems just as wide with murky silvered glass to give the impression of fog and age. Eris releases her grip on his shoulder as she and her reflection step off to one side of the mirror. In relief, finally able to straighten up from his bowed hunchback posture, Dan rolls his shoulder to relieve the small ache building along the bone and silently watches Eris use a key card on a lock similar to that of the basement door. The only difference lies in how the housing for the system’s components have been built into the frame of the mirror itself so it appears as if Eris inserts the key card directly into a looping curve of filigree. A digital beep and a pneumatic hiss of locks giving way one after another is the only warning he receives before the mirror parts neatly in two along a delicate seam through the middle of the glass. Each half pulls inward and then glides along an unseen track to the right and left, allowing access to a darkened passageway hidden beyond the recess behind the wall.

“Overpriced wank, I know,” Eris smirks at his nonplussed expression. “But effective and secure. Come on then, time to meet the others.”

He stares ahead at the great double doors at the end of the passage, eerily reminiscent to those of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, leading towards what he can only assume is the ‘common room’ where the Court must preside. George glances at him behind Eris’s back and gives him a nod in a commiseratory show of comprehension for the dread currently sinking Dan’s heart like a stone in deep water. It’s a nice effort on his part, but Dan isn’t certain they’re on equal wavelengths of emotion to empathize with each other. George for all his misgivings and cynical outlooks had made the active decision to stay. This invitation from Eris was everything he’d purported to want. For him, the room behind those doors signaled opportunity and influence, for Dan it was a gauntlet filled with more conflict and trouble than he thought he could take. Everyone in this house either mocked him or disliked him and he was sure the Court’s reception would be no different.

_Even the statues in this house look like they have a personal vendetta against me._

It’s Dan’s first impression of the towering effigy of a woman standing just inside the entryway like a daunting store greeter. The style of its construction is in the same Grecian attitude as the rest of the statues he’d seen throughout the house. The proportions of this one however are more immense and intimidating. He has no idea who the woman is supposed to depict, but if the overwrought interior décor of the house was any indication, he imagines it could be a personified archetype of an abstract ideal or perhaps a deity or even one of the Court members themselves. The statue’s hair streams out in idyllic waves behind her head and the flowing robes she wears billow out around her figure in the same fixed windswept manner. She stares down at him with eyes that look startlingly alive in the white marble of her face and Dan realizes it’s because they’ve been fitted with agate stones. The only other spot of color on the statue lies in the bright spark of flames writhing up from the brazier she holds in one hand and the large golden apple she offers into the air with the other. It doesn’t seem to suggest a charitable gesture from the lilting angle of the statue’s smirk and the malicious cunning of its stare.

“My namesake.” Eris follows Dan gaze with an appreciable smile, immediately affirming one of his suspicions about the statue’s identity. “She’s holding the apple of discord. Such a small thing and yet, who knew one fruit could be so historically unhealthy?”

She strides over to the base of the pedestal and looks up with her hands on her hips. “I thought it was a fitting way to introduce people to our number, to symbolize what we offer. You see, to accept the apple is to accept power and acclaim with no small measure of conflict in the bargain. But in turn, to reject it is to accept mediocrity and weakness- to affirm to the world you will always ever be second best.”

“What if someone just prefers oranges,” Dan mutters with a tired roll of his eyes.

Eris merely looks back at him with reserved tolerance. “Of course, for some, offering it in the first place is like throwing pearls before swine. But then, for someone who exchanged a college degree to become an online panhandler I wouldn’t expect you to recognize the merit of true opportunities.”

His hands twitch under the tight casing of ropes, an involuntary flex of muscles he can’t restrain past the kindling flare of impatience her words incite. “Could just be I have higher standards than stooping to your level.”

“You might find yourself stooping much lower than that before the night is through,” Eris says. She turns away and gives a flippant wave to George behind her, motioning towards the open entryway and a metallic box mounted on the wall. He moves at once without a word and opens the small hatch on the front of the box. Inside of it Dan notices a miniature switch like a circuit breaker. George flips it and the two halves of the mirror promptly trundle back along their tracks to realign as one, closing off the exit with a hollow thud of engaging locks. Somehow the sound is worse than Eris’s threat. It reinforces the severity of his situation; an auditory confirmation that he was well and truly cut off from all escape now, trapped without a plan or recourse for help.

_This is it… What do I do now?_

As he passes under the statue’s lingering stare, following Eris’s staccato tread down the hall, he reaches for ‘Phil’ at the back of his mind, but this time the only reply he receives is a deep and unsettling silence.

 

 

### ❧❧❧❧

“Cut the lights.”  
Teague leans forward to peer through the windshield, stretching the seatbelt over his chest to its extended limit. “We’re nearly there. I don’t want to risk anyone from the house seeing us turn off on this service road.”

“Teague, I can barely see a damn thing _with_ the lights.” Susan grips the wheel and keeps her focus trained on the road. The wipers continue to work overtime conveying the rain back and forth across the glass, but the unabated rate of the downpour and the profuse darkness of the road they now travel on, without neon markers or streetlamps to light the way, makes visibility drop from bad to worse.

“I can see. I’ll guide you,” Teague says. “Just cut the lights already!”

Susan says nothing to this and Phil glances at her, noting the pensive frown on her face. Her implicit confidence in Teague had been stretched to its limits tonight and he wonders just how much more it could take; if finding out Teague’s latent talents encompassed not only feats of incredible strength but apparently night vision as well would be what finally made her draw the line for what she was willing to overlook.

Her brow knits together. Disbelief and denial seem imminent, but then she only shakes her head wearily, throws up one hand in defeat and reaches for the dimmer switch. “Right then, wonder boy. You got us this far. Lead on.”

The lights abruptly go dark and now all Phil can see in front of the car is a yawning pit of blackness interrupted by startling flashes of lightning which illuminate the landscape ahead like a faulty strobe light. Between each unpredictable strike he sees a thicket of skeletal rowans on either side of the road, dark and imposing, the stuff of Dan’s nightmares made reality and once, after one particularly blinding explosion of electricity in the sky, he makes out the great hulk of a house off in the distance, their intended destination. At this point, he doesn’t think even sticking both hands out the window, along with his feet for good measure, would be enough to ease the nausea churning his stomach and lining the back of his throat with an acidic bite. The rocking motions of the car have little to do with his unease this time so much as wondering what exactly had happened to Dan when they’d become disconnected. Without a call back he’s left as he had been on the train ride home, alone with his thoughts to provide bad ideas for everything which could have gone wrong. The only consolation left to him is the knowledge that they’d arrived at the road leading to the culvert Jorin had mentioned and that soon, barring any further mishaps along the way, they’d find themselves within the house itself, one step closer to finding Dan.

The car trundles forward, a bit slower and more cautiously than before, bid on by Teague’s urging as he points ahead and blurts out where Susan should turn and where she should straighten the wheel to prevent the car from turning off into another ditch. Phil’s stomach pitches and rolls when they catch the deep end of a pothole. Just when he quietly hopes they won’t encounter another one, the car bumbles its way through a series of them, hopping and bouncing like the hydraulics on a lowrider. He grits his teeth and reflexively digs his feet into the floor as if he were pressing on a set of phantom brakes. At this point, Phil’s not sure anymore if walking the rest of the way might not have been a better idea than driving after all. Along with the potholes, the service road’s crumbling macadam spits up stones and gravel against the undercarriage of the car with a racket to rival the inane high pitched screech of their neighbor’s early morning drill renovations. The tires kick up more debris along the car’s shuddering trajectory and each metallic ping and clang makes Susan wince, perhaps at the idea of the potential damage she’d have to remedy later. Even at their decreased rate of speed it’s nerve wracking to watch the car coast along on nothing more than Susan’s confidence in Teague’s unconventional navigation methods. One bad suggestion or miscalculation and they’d be right back where they started before, this time stranded for good.

 _Better not to think about it._ Phil breathes in through his nose slowly, calmly, trying to do anything but think about it even as his brain continues to supply him with images of the car mired in a pool of mud, surrounded by trees twisted into unnatural shapes by the wind battering their branches. The little chill of fear remains lodged along his spine like a second skin and he dislikes the sensation, hates how it inches along his fingers with a small tremble he can’t help even as he stuffs them deep in his pockets.

 _Right about now, if Dan were here, he’d probably say I was making that face I get when I’m worrying too much about something. At least we’re moving. That’s something good, right? If it weren’t for Teague we might still be stuck back there and if we hadn’t left the house we wouldn’t be here at all. So many things could have gone wrong-_ He pauses and reconsiders the incident in the alley, Dan’s near disastrous bite and his later abduction. _Okay, I guess they kind of did go wrong, but they could have gone worse and they didn’t._  
He deliberately avoids addressing the underlying nagging worry which suggests things still had a good chance of going worse. It was already difficult enough to pretend he wasn’t half as afraid as he felt about entering a house where he had no idea what to expect or how to react in the moment. So much was riding on his ability to succeed.

Entertaining the thought of failure, no matter how likely the probability seemed, wasn’t something he could afford to waste time on. He’d have to make do and carry on the best he could, just as Susan and Teague had advised him he should. Besides, he thinks, if he spent every waking hour wondering and worrying over what could go wrong before it did he’d never leave his room, let alone the house. Bad experiences in life were a given. As a child he’d been through the smaller trial runs of such experiences in nursing knee scrapes after falling off bicycles, getting burned with an unspent firework on Bonfire Night, and breaking his nose after running into a wall. Going through the small scale trauma of such incidents hadn’t instilled a fear of bike rides, fireworks or the simple act of walking, but it had given him a cautious respect for his surroundings and allowed him to understand that sometimes accidents were inevitable and despite various traumas and setbacks, life continued on. Being perpetually frightened of eventualities which may or may not come to pass wasn’t the way he wanted to live his life, but at the same time it’s the simple act of not knowing what could happen next which disturbs him the most, especially when someone else’s life was at stake, most especially a loved one; most especially Dan.

His grandmother, famed family psychic and uncanny intuitive, might have lent a hand in helping forecast the possible outcome of his future to help him ward off bad luck and disaster. She might have pored over the patterns of settled tea leaves in the bottom of an esoteric cup decorated with abstract pictograms where innocuous dregs of green tea suddenly became heralds of calmer times if covering the symbol of a boat sailing placidly across the waves or portended treachery if it landed below that of a coiled snake. Without his grandmother’s tea set, a pack of tarot cards or even the fickle retorts of a toy magic 8 ball to give him some insight of what to expect once they arrived, Phil’s left trying not to make sense of the intimidating shapes in the shadows of the trees like makeshift augury on the go, where every worry he stifles under more lighthearted thoughts turns the unassuming bend of a branch into gnarled vicious looking figures instead. A flash of lightning helpfully turns the shapes back into trees, but when the light ebbs away, the shadows go back to looking more reptant and alive than he’d like.

A jittering bounce more brutal than the others distracts him from squinting at the silhouette of what he thinks looks like a squirrel boxing with a penguin. He rocks forward against the seatbelt and the descending thump snaps him back into the seat with enough force to make his brains feel like scrambled eggs. Now he doesn’t have a mind to puzzle over what the image of squirrels pretending to be Rocky Balboa could mean, he only wants the ride to be over with before the small dazed stars floating in front of his eyes portended his decision to boycott anything to do with cars for the rest of his life.

“That’s it!” Teague exuberantly points ahead and in the dim atmospheric glow of more lightning strikes Phil sees the object of his enthusiasm. A wide, pitch black cavern of a culvert dug into the base of a scraggy overgrown hill. It hadn’t sounded pleasant back when Jorin had discussed it as an alternate entrance to the house and up close it’s even less inviting. Susan shifts the car to park and rests her forehead against the wheel with a small wheezing laugh of disbelief.

“This has to be the most unreal situation I’ve ever been involved with, barring that one time I stole the prime minister’s car.”

“You _what?_ ” Teague stares at her.

“An armored Jaguar sentinel, unguarded, with the door unlocked and the engine running? When I was still running around on an adrenaline high of risk and danger, it was like shaking a suitcase full of sweets in front of a kid. I just had to know how the thing ran.”

“And you got away with it?” Phil asks, dumbfounded.

“Managed to take it three blocks before my nerve gave out, then I legged it all the way to the river where I hid out in a houseboat for a week with this lady and her five Pyrenees. Not bad, really. Bit stuffy and slobbery, but they never found me.” Susan shakes her head. “Lucky break that, but I guess they were willing to overlook some kid taking a five minute joyride than have the Prime Minister’s security detail blasted by the press if they ever found out.”

Susan looks up at the foreboding maw of the culvert ahead of the car. “Still, I wonder if putting up with MI-5 might be better than heading in there.”

“Probably. Although I’m banking on the house being the worst obstacle we have to deal with. You ready?” Teague glances over at Phil with an expression meant to say they would have to go whether he really was or not.

Phil nods, but in his jacket pockets his hands clench restlessly. He doesn’t know if Teague can sense the anxiety drifting up from him like a kindling fire, but Teague merely nods back and turns to address Susan again as he places a hand on her arm.

“Hope you’re ready too because this time you really are our getaway driver, but with one condition and I’m serious about this- if in a few hours we’re not back yet- you leave without us.”

“Sorry?”

“You leave and you don’t come back here.”

Phil looks on in the rear view mirror as Susan’s side profile takes on the same intimidating, aggravated glower she’d directed at the Volvo estate earlier. “Bullshit. I’m not abandoning the both of you in the middle of Blair Witch hell without an explanation. I don’t care how much you ask me to trust you this time.”

“Sus-”

“No. I don’t know what you’re facing in there and by the sound of his friend on the phone I don’t think the company in that house is exactly pleasant. If things go south, I’m going in, no matter if I have to call in a false report of an explosion or a tactical nuke demonstration to get the fire brigade and half the police force to help break you both out.”

“Technically, couldn’t we do that now?” Phil perks up. “Make an anonymous call or something and send up a whole fleet of police to their door? They’d never expect it.”

“Of course they would,” Teague groans and wearily rests his head back against the seat. “Jorin already said they’ve prepared for every eventuality. Wouldn’t be surprised if they owned the Met by now. You start calling in the authorities without good reason they’ll only clear out and take Dan with them, this time to a place maybe even Jorin doesn’t know about. Even if we decide to do it anyway, after hours, during the day, no one would be able to find them in that house. I told you, history taught them well about mobs and outside threats and if anyone has the resources to disappear right under the noses of the best taskforce in the nation, it’s the Court.”

“The Court.” Susan repeats the word in a sullen tone. “Sounds like a faction of the mob.”

“Pretty much.” Teague fiddles uneasily with his seatbelt again.

“And with that happy thought in mind I’m meant to turn the car around, say ‘ah, well, guess things didn’t work out,’ go back home, make some tea and watch Good Morning Britain like nothing happened?”

“I know it’s not easy-”

“You think?”

“So I’ll make it easier for you.”

“What are you –” Susan leans back warily as Teague’s stare turns dark and unyielding. At first Phil isn’t sure what’s going on as her next words die away to a mumbling burble, like the sound of intermittent static on a radio struggling through a bad frequency to become audible speech again.

“Susan, I’m sorry, but I have to do this,” Teague says softly and he catches her hand firmly in his the way Jorin had captured the hand of the waitress in the tavern. “After a few hours pass, if me and Phil aren’t back yet, you’ll leave, go home and you won’t come back here. You’ll remember us, but not this evening. Not driving us here, not speaking with us; definitely not this moment right now. You’ll only have the impulse to leave here when the time comes and if you wonder why you were here at all it’s because you got caught out late in the storm and you lost your way.”

Susan wavers in place and in her reflection in the rearview mirror Phil sees her eyes droop in drowsy contemplation. Her mouth twitches, struggling between a frown and a dreamy smile.

“I –I was caught out late…in the storm…”

“Yes. And you won’t question it later.” Teague continues holding her listing gaze. “Half because, it’s just like you to lose track of time when you’re out late with friends and driving around in an apocalyptic storm is the kind of mad adventure you still like to get mixed up in even if you’re not that same kid running around on an adrenaline high of risk and danger. And also because I asked, because you trust me and because we’re friends. You have things you want to accomplish, new goals you’d like to achieve and you should be around to make that possible. And you will. But first, when it’s time, you’ll leave.”

“I’ll leave…when it’s time, I’ll go,” Susan mumbles her way around the words, but she doesn’t look convinced.

“Is that really necessary?” Phil peers over at Susan, worried for her. “I know what it’s like to have someone mess about with your thoughts and it’s not great.”

Teague sighs and looks away, allowing Susan’s hand to fall from his grasp. “I know it’s not. I hate it. It’s still a bad mindfuck no matter if it’s the Court doing it or me, but if we fail here tonight I don’t want her to be our collateral damage. We make it back, she’ll be fine. She won’t remember me asking her to leave. We don’t make it back, then she’ll raise hell and rightly so I guess, but if I can avoid someone else getting snared by the Court then planting a suggestion in her head is a small price to pay.”

“I guess if we –when we make it back,” Phil quickly corrects himself, “you could make her forget about what you did before with the car so she wouldn’t question it later on either.”

“Nah.” Teague shakes his head. “It’s good to have a healthy curiosity and suspicion about things, especially things like us. I’m not going to take that away from her just so I can be comfortable being her friend. Doesn’t seem fair, you know? Or healthy. I just want her to be safe. Maybe it’s still a piss poor excuse, but it’s the only way to make sure she survives if we don’t.”

Phil glances back at Susan, watching her waver and stare off into space above Teague’s head. With their positions reversed, if it were Dan he wanted to protect from a situation gone wrong and he needed to convince him to stay away, he wonders if he would do the same as Teague, plant a suggestion in Dan’s head to keep him from harm. He thinks perhaps, given the right circumstances, he just might.

“Well, come on. It’s our turn to be off on our own mad adventure.” With a distant look of unease on his face, Teague pops open the door and clambers out into the roar of the rain. As he closes it behind him, Phil spares one more glance at Susan’s dreaming profile and murmurs, “be safe,” in a resonant hushed tone like an apology before leaving the car to join Teague in the middle of the furious deluge.

They don’t waste time to discuss their unfortunate lack of wellington’s or umbrellas and instead race for the shadowed safety of the culvert ahead. Phil’s trainers sink into the mud, quickly turning their off-white cleanliness into a slick, muddled brown up to his laces. More water and mud splatters the hems of his trousers and by the time they reach the culvert his socks are swimming in small cold puddles of damp. Things inside the darkened tunnel aren’t improved much however. He no longer has to worry about rain pelting his head from above, but at his feet a steady good sized jet of water rushes out from the darkness like a miniature river funneling off from an underground vein.  
Teague angles his trainers in front of the rushing water to rinse off the splatters of mud stuck to the sides and Phil does the same, but afterwards he wishes he hadn’t as his socks only feel soggier than before.

“You’ll need the torch on your phone to get through here.” Teague nods ahead at the flat darkness extending out into an interminable distance before them. “Hell, even I need it.”  
Phil fishes for the phone in his pocket and engages the beam, accidentally pointing it straight into Teague’s eyes.

“Ah, shit!” Teague winces away, waving his hands in front of his face to ward it off and Phil immediately empathizes, assuming it must be like the times when he woke up in the middle of the night and idly checked his phone only for the screen’s brightness to momentarily blind him.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Phil immediately directs it into the tunnel ahead, but before he does an uneasy burst of déjà vu comes over him.

For a moment, just as the torch light had swung away, Teague’s eyes had shone with the lambent glow of a nocturnal animal caught staring from the shadows.

 _Like a wolf,_ Phil thinks and it strikes him that he’s seen this before, that he’s thought the same thing in much the same circumstances, but in the heat of the moment, with the chill of the water winding its way through his trainers to his socks and the adrenaline rush of just wanting to get to Dan, he can’t place the sensation of familiarity.

“Alright?” Teague looks over the torch beam at him and again, a green white shine flickers over his left eye before he moves away and again, the feeling of déjà vu comes on a little stronger.

“Fine,” Phil says quickly. “I think…”

“No idea how far this thing leads. Jorin never mentioned how extensive it was, but I figure if we head off in the direction of the house, which was to our east, then we should be okay.”

“I always heard if you need to find your way when you’re lost you should follow a current of water.”

“Was that downstream or upstream? Because downstream is back out there.” Teague points at the mouth of the culvert behind them. “And wherever upstream is could be well out of the way we’re meant to go.”

“Oh, right. Sorry, didn’t think about that.”

“It’s good advice above ground, but down here there’s no telling how many other tunnels lead off from this one. Best to try and keep to the simplest path available.”

“Makes me wish there was a Google maps for underground caverns,” Phil mutters as they slosh through the gushing water beneath their heels. His right foot catches a piece of debris hidden under the murky jet and he nearly stumbles headlong into the midst of it. Teague whirls around with one hand out to catch him, but Phil braces himself in time against the cylindrical metal wall at his side. He’s unprepared however for the unctuous texture of the surface under his palm and with a short jittered breath of disgust he snatches his hand away. A dark viscous substance like oil comes off the wall with him and he impulsively wipes it on his trousers, intending to chuck them out entirely once he got home.

“I don’t really want to know what that is,” Phil says.

“You and me both.” Teague looks at the walls and suppresses a shudder. “I don’t know if this connects to a sewer, but the smell in here isn’t far off from the cesspools they used to have throughout London back in the day. Remember when they used to vent the things at night and the smell was god awful, just how the city smelled on the regular before they decided to give proper sanitation laws a go. Watch your step. Wouldn’t be a joke for us to get through this, only for you to come down with some kind of septic infection later on.”

 _Lovely_ , Phil thinks as they plod on, the path becoming darker and dingier with every step they take, but as he continues to furiously wipe off his palm the strange sense of familiarity grows and lingers in his mind like a spreading cloud. He struggles to understand why, but once again, just as he thinks he’s got the answer, it slips away. Another more pressing question takes its place and he looks up at the back of Teague’s head wondering if he should dare ask. A few more paces of tense, silent plodding and Teague pauses in the middle of the path with a despondent splash.

“You want to ask me something, right?”

“I- er, yeah.” Phil pulls up short behind him in surprise and points the torch at the ceiling to allow the diffuse light to fill the space around them. “You could smell that on me?”

“No, not every emotion is like a lit scented candle. Just most of them.” Teague turns around and idly kicks the water running around his shoes. “I could tell you wanted to ask me the entire way back from the tavern, but you held back. Now you want to ask me again, but you’re not sure how to go about it. I sensed it the same way you can feel someone deliberately staring at you even when you don’t notice them at first.” He aims another weak kick at the water and looks up. “It’s about that comment Jorin made. About me and Yilmaz.”

Phil nods. “After what you said before about her it seemed strange of you to ask her for help.”

“If you really want to know, she came with me when I tried to save my friend after I petitioned her for help. I thought given her history with the Court she’d gladly leap at the chance to face them down, but when the time came, when they started to surround him, she did fuck all but watch. Her, the most powerful, most dangerous of them all, just stood there like it was a spectator event and she wanted to enjoy the show. It was a Faustian bargain to begin with, I should’ve known that, but I ignored the consequences and paid the price. Guess I should be grateful she pulled me out when they started after me next.”

“So when you said you’d barely managed to escape, it was because of her? Yilmaz?”

“Yeah. I survived because of her. Small consolation.” Teague passes a hand over his face. “It’s like those old stories of people asking for help from creatures and gods they know nothing about and getting fucked twenty ways to the grave for it. You have to know what you’re getting into, but no matter if you do it’s always a surprise every time. The nasty sort.”

Phil momentarily wonders if the same could be said of Teague, if perhaps agreeing to his assistance might be one such example of a regrettable Faustian bargain with a preternatural being he barely understood, but as soon as the thought enters his mind, he dismisses it with no small amount of guilt. Teague had given his word, had pledged his assistance without hesitating, first upon meeting Dan and then later when leaving Phil to face the Court by himself might have been in Teague’s best interest. No matter what he was, on the surface, just like Dan, he remained someone worthy of confidence and trust. Phil remembers Jorin’s offhand advice that if he wasn’t careful his innate kindness might one day prove to be an unfavorable flaw, one easily taken advantage of. The world did have a tendency to shortchange the most well-meaning people, to take their kindness and turn it into a joke, to deride compassion and tenderness as a weakness to be overcome, but throughout his life Phil maintained that in a universe where pain and tragedy were more commonplace than he wished was possible, he’d defy becoming the reflection of such pain and be that which he wished to see more of, something better and lighter; someone who could face the darkness of uncertainty with a light of his own and change the world around him in unprecedented and unbelievable ways, to shatter all preconceptions of doubt and hurt to become someone who could trust others and be trusted himself. It was a small thing in the wake of larger scale upheavals occurring every day globally and personally in a person’s life, but he thinks perhaps it was the effort what counted in the end. For everything, it was always the effort what counted most. Just as Teague’s effort to surmount his fears to help Phil was all the proof Phil needed to know that trusting Teague was far from anything he might later regret.

“She stood by and didn’t help,” Teague continues. “But I’m not planning on following her example. Because I gave my word to help; because I know what it’s like to lose someone you care for and not be able to do a thing to stop it. I’m not as old as those buzzards in the Court or as cunning, but I’d like to think my presence gives a small advantage better than just a human on their own.”

“I think it’s already a great advantage, believe me. It’s nice not to be alone.” Phil smiles and Teague looks away, rubbing at the back of his head in a shy, embarrassed manner. He recovers quickly however and clears his throat.

“Right. There’s no time to stand around talking. Let’s get on with this. He’s waiting.” Teague turns around with a small smile of his own and continues forward, but his last words stop Phil in his tracks as he tries to remember where he’s heard them before.

_There’s something familiar about it, the exact wording might be off, but that phrase…he’s waiting…I know I’ve heard–_

The dream on the train.

Suddenly all the half remembered fragments of his disturbing journey through a penumbral cave resurface with startling intensity. He’s been here before, only he hasn’t because then it had been only a dream, only a nightmare, one where certain images and words had repeated themselves through coincidence and habitual worry he couldn’t help. Yet, he’s back in the off putting reek and darkness of the cave, following a vampire instead of a cat, off to find Dan at the end of the tunnel and see whether or not his short holiday with the Court might have been enough to turn him into a very real version of the fang lined feral monstrosity Phil had encountered before jolting awake into the day lit security of a train car.

“You can’t say something’s not wrong now. Not with _that_ look on your face.”

Teague’s voice startles him and he nearly drops the phone straight down into the cold rush of the water at his feet.

“What is it?” Teague peers at him and as Phil steadies his grip on the phone, the torch beam flares to life in Teague’s eyes with the same disturbing neon glow, exactly how Dan’s eyes had been in the dream.

“I don’t know. It’s weird.” Phil points the torch back at the ceiling and Teague’s eyes seep back to normal.

“What’s weird?”

“Do you believe dreams have a chance of coming true?” Phil asks. “That sometimes you can see things that don’t make sense after you wake up, but later on, maybe days or weeks later, parts of the dream start to happen?”

Teague gives him a quizzical amused look. “What- you dream about wading through grimy runoff while following a vampire before?”

“Sort of…”

“I’m guessing the dream didn’t have the best ending for you to look like that. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Teague idly waves a hand. “That’s just the way dreams are, innit? Sometimes you dream about strange disjointed shit that looks like a Dali painting mated with an Escher and other times you dream about walking through a place down a street you’ve never been before and one day you find yourself down that same stretch of road at the exact time of day you dreamed about and it don’t exactly mean anything else other than the subconscious is the scariest, weirdest part of existence, vampires aside.”

Phil hesitates. “That’s what I thought before, but what if it’s not all coincidence, what if there’s something else?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I had a dream once about operating a rollercoaster, which didn’t work out so well now that I remember it and I’ve never worked at an amusement park before. I had this other dream where my legs were cut off at the ankles and of course I woke up with my feet still attached, but this is different. It doesn’t just feel like I’m reliving every moment of the dream. It’s more like a premonition. A bad one.”

“Nothing like soggy socks to turn everything into a bad premonition, honestly. There’s your whole day ruined.” Teague chuckles and splashes the water at his feet for effect. “You could call it serendipity or accidental divination, but either way, no one knows the true outcome of what might happen until it does. You could spend years reading up on that stuff and life will still keep you guessing every time. I’m telling you- whatever you saw in that dream, you’re better off not thinking about it.”

“You’re right,” Phil says, but internally he‘s not sure it’s a feat he can manage, not when every step further into the tunnel reminds him of his journey through the dream.  
There were too many similarities and yet, not everything is exactly the same. In his dream the cave had been exactly that, a subterranean unpleasant hole in the earth without the sounds of running water or the reliable presence of a friend to help guide him. Other things however are too similar to dismiss so easily. Every noise, every errant drop of water off a metal curve or the wet thump of his trainers against a patch of sodden silt or hard edged rock echoes off the thick metal walls around them in strange distorted refractions of sound, so at times he thinks he hears a crowd of voices whispering under their breath somewhere off in the distance and at others it sounds as if they’re hovering right behind his ear, just like the garbled voices he’d heard in the dream. He figures the acoustics in any cavernous, enclosed space had a tendency to be funny at the best of times, let alone when every nerve in his body was primed with adrenaline and worry. At one point he believes he hears the distinctive splash of footsteps following them, plodding through the water every time he takes a step as if trying to keep in time with the rhythm of his gait to avoid detection.  
The first time he hears it he thinks he’s just being paranoid. The second time he’s only half sure, but by the third time he pulls up short and stops, too scared to look back and too embarrassed to admit he might just be hearing things.  
Teague pauses again and looks around at him.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he begins to say but at Teague’s raised eyebrow he decides it better to confess. “I just thought I heard someone….behind us.”

Immediately, Teague steps to and peers into the darkness over Phil’s shoulder, eyes narrowed just like a wolf scenting the air for unwanted predators in its territory. Phil listens along too, straining to hear anything over the monotonous warble of water along the path, but there’s nothing. Typical that it would stop after he’d brought it up.

_Or maybe the footsteps stopped because I stopped. Maybe it’s still there behind us, in the dark, looking at us. Waiting…_

But after a moment in which Phil can feel his heartbeat painfully throbbing against his Adam’s apple like a small hammer, Teague shrugs and shakes his head.  
“Nothing but a lot of water and hollow metal to make it sound like something it isn’t. There’s nothing in here but us and a few rats. Couple spiders too by the look of those webs.”

He points up to the corrugated rusted ceiling above their heads and Phil directs the torch up again to see a cottony tangle of spider webs he hadn’t noticed before. Rats he could deal with, at least when outside the not so hygienic surroundings of an old culvert, but spiders? He remembers an article he’d read once about a sudden downpour of thousands of spiders touching down in the middle of a residential street in Australia and he nervously eyes the clotted bundles above his head, wondering if they might burst open at any second like a nightmarish piñata full of leggy multi-eyed monstrosities. A violent shudder of disgust wracks his arms and he forgets all about dreams and voices and possible footsteps in the dark as they press on ahead at a brisk jog, with Phil warily eyeing the webs every few minutes for any signs of imminent hatching.

Teague moves with confidence, never hesitating to question his surroundings or their direction, guided on by a mysterious instinct that leads them down winding circuitous routes that to Phil seems to bring them right back where they started, but it’s difficult to tell when the only landmarks of rusted walls and spider webs all look the same. They must be making progress or so he hopes and supposes whatever innate GPS Teague was using to lead the way was all mixed up in the nature of what a vampire was, exactly how Dan could now sense things by smell and sight in a way Phil would never be able to match, a byproduct of some genetic instinct which was as inexplicable and deeply ingrained as an unconscious habit.

 _Like a homing pigeon,_ Phil thinks suddenly and the mental image comes to him of Teague roosting on a power line with a flock of other birds, softly cooing for breadcrumbs.

_Buffy the Vampire Bird Slayer. The spinoff nobody expected._

As soon as the idea occurs to him, he stifles a splutter of laughter before Teague can hear.

The warm burst of humor doesn’t last long when he suddenly feels the pin point sensation of something crawling up the side of his neck towards his ear. A distinctly eight legged something. With visions of a plump wiry legged spider making a beeline to his ear canal, he drops the phone into the water without thinking, too occupied with slapping frantically at his neck while splashing around in wide, drunken circles to notice.

“What the- what are you-??” Teague hurries towards him in baffled consternation. “What’s wrong?!”

Phil hop shuffles backwards, clawing at his neck and head in case another wayward relative of the first had decided to fall into his hair, when finally he manages to choke out the word, “spider!”

“You’ve probably long since smacked the thing clear out of this plane of existence by now, mate, holy shit. You’re going to knock yourself out too any second if you keep that up.” Teague seizes his shoulders and steadies him. “You’re clear. No, listen to me. There’s not a spider on you.”

“ _You sure?_ ” The question comes out embarrassedly more high-pitched and breathy than he’d expected. Phil coughs to clear his throat and tries again. “You sure?”

“Not even the ghost of the one you KO’d.”

Phil cautiously lowers his arms. The skittering intruder seems to have fled or been thrown to a parallel universe by his frantic dance as Teague suggested. His entire body feels itchy however and it’s difficult not to start scratching himself raw to dislodge the lingering sensation of more spiders crawling over his skin even though he knows they’re not actually there. He grits his teeth against the impulse until it fades away and takes a sharp breath in through his nose. “No spiders. Right. Good.”

“And no torch anymore either,” Teague laments as he looks down at the water rushing over the blinkering screen of Phil’s discarded phone.

_Oh no._

Phil rushes to fish it out, but the screen gives one final death rattle of flickering lights before both the screen and the torch cut to black. Teague becomes an indistinct mass in the dark and when Phil waves a hand in front of his face he can barely make out the shape of his fingers. From spiders to pitch darkness, it’s like winning a bad lottery he never volunteered to play with a payout of increasingly misfortunate situations. He shakes the phone and tries to dry it off against the front of his jacket but it remains dark in his hand.

“No good,” Teague says, “we’ll have to do without it. Not like I can’t see where I’m going, even if the torch helped.”

“I know you can see, but I can’t. I can barely see _you._ ”

“That’s alright. I’m aware of you. If you stray off I’ll know. Just keep listening for where I walk.” A deliberate splash kicks up water over Phil’s trainers as Teague demonstrates the sound he should follow. “There’s no way we’ll lose each other down here.”

With their run of luck so far, Phil has his doubts, but he replaces the useless brick of his phone back in his pocket and continues on after the heavy plod of Teague’s footsteps. He keeps one hand clenched over his phone out of the faint hope it might still revive, if only with enough strength to deliver some news from Dan. The entire ride here in the car he’d been expecting the phone to ring again and for Dan’s voice to be on the other end when he picked up, to say he’d managed to escape and was heading towards the basement to meet them. If he found a way to reach out now, he’d find nothing but silence and the automated request for him to leave a voicemail Phil could never reach.

_But we’re nearly there anyway. We’re almost there, so just hold on, Dan. Wherever you are right now, just hold on._

Phil thinks maybe it wasn’t all so bad. He at least had a weapon of some sort he could throw at any would be assailants if he needed to, although he wasn’t sure an iPhone was really the most reliable defense against a vampire, unless it wasn’t garlic they were allergic to but smartphones. He’d heard of some people developing nickel allergies to their phones and breaking out in blotchy red blisters, but he’s not sure randomly throwing phones at immortal creatures in the hopes one of them might be mildly inconvenienced by a rash was the best plan of defense to follow.

 _Forget the phone,_ he thinks. _I have to keep focusing on Teague before I lose him._

He doesn’t have long to worry about straying off course when, after another long winding trail following the sounds of splashing ahead he runs straight into Teague who’s stopped directly in the middle of the path.

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you’d –”

_“Shh!”_

Surprised, Phil goes quiet as requested and the tunnel fills with the chortling echoes of running water. The longer Teague remains still without explanation the more Phil’s unease grows into another unbearable itch of tension down his chest. Minutes pass and tension gives way to restlessness. The itch extends itself to the webbing between his fingers and pools around his wrists like uncomfortable bracelets, prickling along his skin, until Phil can’t take it anymore.

“ _Teague._ ” He whispers the name like a plea.

After another long pause, Teague finally whispers back. “I think you were right.”

“Right about what?”

“I think there might be someone else in here with us after all.”

The itch spreads and festers into an allover sting of cold dread. This doesn’t feel like a bad lottery now so much as monumentally bad karma, maybe brought on by that one time he’d downloaded an episode of Breaking Bad off a file sharing site or all the times he’d stolen handfuls of Dan’s cereal when no one was looking. Whichever it was he’s not sure how things could possibly go any more wrong than they already had until Teague murmurs, “Stay here. I’m going ahead. I’ll call to you if the way is clear.”

Stay here? Alone? In the dark? When someone or something else might be in this tunnel with them?

Teague had neglected to say if the ‘someone’ was human and Phil thinks the omission was deliberate. Why else would he be so on edge if it was just a vagrant skulking around the tunnels for shelter from the storm? It had to be another vampire, one who posed a significant enough threat that even Phil, perfectly human, without the benefit of heightened powers of perceptions, can feel Teague’s discomfort like a trickle of ice down the back of his neck.

 _Or that could just be because another spider fell one me_ , he thinks as he swipes at the collar of his jacket just to be sure.

“And if it’s not clear,” Phil hisses back in a frantic stage whisper. “What are we supposed to do then?”

“I’ll deal with it. While I’m with you nothing is going to attack you. You’ve got my word on that.”

 _But accidents happen_ , Phil thinks. _You said it yourself-life has a way of keeping you guessing and I don’t like the idea of having a working demonstration._

But what else could he do except allow Teague to meet the threat blocking their progress forward? It was the only option they had other than turning back and giving up.  
He clenches his hands into fists, suddenly yearning for the kind of strength Teague and Dan possessed, to be able to stand his ground against considerable threats; to meet danger with a dangerous will of his own. Not a reckless or violent will, but a capable one. One that didn’t silently quake at the idea of being so defenseless and vulnerable in the face of whatever preternatural unknown lay ahead.

A cold hand softly covers the bunched fingers of his right hand and he jumps before realizing it’s only Teague.

“You’ll be alright. Trust me.”

Phil nods and wonders if Teague can see it in the opaque gloom around them. “….okay. I’ll stay here.”

Teague squeezes his hand once in reassurance, then his hand recedes and all goes silent again. Phil doesn’t hear the sound of splashing to signal his footsteps leading off anywhere and he wonders what Teague could be doing standing there if he’d said he was going ahead.

Phil reaches out tentatively, aiming for Teague’s shoulder and is surprised when he meets nothing except air. He takes a small mincing step forward, trying for careful and quiet, but failing as he reaches out further and once more grasps nothing but empty space. Phil had already witnessed the extent of a vampire’s speed, but the stealth with which Teague has disappeared, without displacing one drop of water to give his position away, leaves Phil shaken. If Teague had been able to move with such liquid quiet grace even in this environment where every minute sound was amplified to be as loud as a gunshot, then who was to say the mysterious stranger couldn’t move in the same manner? Or hadn’t already moved, perhaps to a position right behind him?

Phil whirls around, spraying water in a circle as he brings one fist up and reaches out with the other in a warding stance. He waits, listens, prepared for something-anything, eyes wide and teeth grit, but nothing happens. Silence again. Nothing but water plinking against the sides of the tunnel as it races along on its path, this time with clanging echoes that sound like faint chortling laughter at his defensive wheeling stunts as he whirls around again to face the other direction.

_Stay put. Stay still. It’s fine. I’ll be fine. Like Teague said._

But as the minutes pass without an all clear he feels less and less fine. He’s not sure if it’s paranoia again, but he swears he feels someone staring at him. On the outside, on a crowded day lit London street, he was no stranger to the peculiar weighted sensation of someone’s stare on his back when he would turn to find a viewer who had recognized him, eyeing him with a mixture of blank disbelief and hesitant awe. Their intention at least was benign, a fascination soon dealt with via a smile, exchanged words and a picture to send them on their way just as he had done earlier in the park, but there’s nothing benign about the feeling crawling down his back now, worse than an entire congregation of spiders.

If he stayed with his back to the wall, via Dan’s own personal advice for strange and terrifying situations, any unseen threat would have no choice but to meet him head on. He doesn’t like the idea, nor the thought of having to chuck out his jacket with his trousers once he smeared his back with whatever accumulated goop covered the walls, but having some means of defense is a better alternative than being ambushed by a pair of cold hands wrapping around his neck from behind. He backs into the wall and shivers. The rusted metal is freezing, chilling him to the bone straight through his layers of clothing. He makes a mental note to buy a thermal jacket at the next opportunity, maybe one with an inner pocket to hold a portable heating pad.

_And an extra torch. An extra phone too. Maybe a flamethrower. Or a freeze ray. That’d be good._

He stills and waits again. Time continues to pass without a reappearance from Teague. The water mumbles around him, taking on the cadence of voices which in his piqued desperation start to sound like Teague calling to him from all directions. He knows it’s only the effect of strained acoustics, just his mind warping the abstract sounds into something more familiar and comfortable for him to understand, but then the garbled rush of water takes on the clear distinctive sound of a voice, low and amused; absolutely real and absolutely not Teague.

“ _I see you._ ” It croons the words like a lullaby from an unknown distance in the tunnel back the way they’d came. “ _I see you…_ ”

Forget not moving. Forget staying put. Phil drops all pretense of calm and bolts.

The voice, faint from behind him, descends into a terrifying graveled laugh and he charges on into the darkness with all the celerity and grace of a rampaging beast. A frightened one. He doesn’t have trouble admitting that to himself. He’d yell it to the world if asked to. Yelling seems like a good idea in general, but his mouth opens in a soundless gasp of exhalations, his fear too great and pure for him to vocalize. He could accept a certain amount of the creepy and the inexplicable in his life, but certain things, like disembodied voices in an underground tunnel in the dark, were simply unacceptable. He doesn’t know what remedy his grandmother might have for such a situation apart from telling him to, ‘leg it, boy.’ Not that anyone needs to tell him twice. And if the stranger to whom the voice belonged happened to stand in his way he’d bowl them over like a runaway train before stopping. Not that he could stop in time anyway when he couldn’t see where he was going.

He barrels along the tunnel, turning blindly in whatever opposite direction the voice was not. If it appeared to come from his left, he banked right. If from his right, he darted left and if from directly behind he thundered forward. It occurs to him later the voice might just be shepherding him along to a location it wanted him to be, corralling him into a trap or tiring him out the way a hyena might patiently wait for injured prey to give up and collapse before pouncing, but in his frenzy Phil doesn’t consider any possibility other than escape.

He tries to call out to Teague and the name catches at the back of his throat, escaping in a labored wheeze. Every breath escapes the same way and finally, after what seems like an eternity more of dodging and weaving down paths like a startled rabbit jackknifing wildly away from hunters in hot pursuit, Phil is obligated to stop and catch his breath before succumbing to lack of oxygen and depleted strength. He’d force himself to carry on anyway right to the brink of collapse, to keep from finding out what would happen next once the voice and its owner caught up to him, but his legs feel like pillars of cement.

 _Too much_ , he thinks, _this is too much. I can’t do this, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t._

He’s surprised he’s made it this far given the pace of his heart jittering at a rate he imagines would break an EKG machine. Things shouldn’t be this painful, this frightening; this impossible. Forming any coherent thoughts past this idea is a struggle, not when his current situation could only be summed up as painful, frightening and impossible.

It’s worse than the time he’d floundered desperately in the middle of the ocean while on holiday diving off the shallows of the Great Barrier Reef. In an overabundance of confidence, too proud and excited to worry about strapping himself into the absurdly pink marshmallow of a flotation device offered to him, he’d powered ahead through the water on his own and shortly thereafter had met the limits of his endurance, both physically and mentally. There, in bright daylight, surrounded by families and lifeguards, with the seabed only a few feet below his toes, he’d been overwhelmed with the same paralyzing fear as now. Water had splashed into his snorkel, filling his nose and mouth with the salty brined taste of the ocean, arresting his ability to breathe or think coherently and when the snorkel itself had slipped off his face, he’d been robbed of the ability to see as well. Effectively blind, in distress and with one flipper floating off on the crest of a wave, he’d been brought up to speed with the startling, terrifying reality that he could very well drown, that he was in fact in the process of doing so. Paddling through the waves had only slapped more water up his nose and without two flippers to steer he was circling uselessly, far away from the promise of the island shore a mile off onto the horizon. Who cared about the capability of courage and self-determined will when he couldn’t swim? And who cared about being Phil Lester, being the bold, vibrant and open personality, when it didn’t matter here in the dark, alone with a disembodied voice and the encroaching threat of vampires in a house somewhere far above his head?

Anyone would be terrified, he thinks. Some things were just more than the average human could take on their own, vampires and subterranean tunnels notwithstanding.

Despite his best efforts, he wasn’t a paragon of patience at all times, especially not when he couldn’t prevent a dilemma from evolving into a full blown crisis. As always, not knowing what might happen next is worse than seeing it unfold. At least then he could deal with variables he could try to understand and reinterpret to his benefit, but here like this, with his pulse rocketing to a headache inducing pressure at his temples and each breath rattling in his throat with a dry wheeze; bereft of friends, assistance or comfort, he’s reduced to a state of outright terror.

He’s alone here. One human living the very real threat of a crisis no longer confined to a dream. His lungs hurt, his head hurts and the fear of enduring greater pain catalyzes his heart into overdrive. Once more his brain falls back to a repetitive moan of, ‘no, no, this is too much, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.’

If Dan were here he might say Phil had ‘The Look’ again and if asked to describe what exactly he meant, Dan would have pointed out the panicky, flustered expression on his face, a portrait of undisguised dread which was most often accompanied by a rigid backwards clawed grip on his trouser pockets, like a bad tell giving away every ounce of latent insecurity without saying a word.

It had been like this in the dream, he remembers. And just as in the dream he reaches back into the flotsam of memories and thoughts in his head to search for a scrap of encouragement in the form of Dan’s voice. It surges up to the surface on cue, strong and resonant, as if Dan were standing right beside him, like an eidetic image with a mind of its own, amusedly nudging his shoulder with a gentle demand for him to snap out of it.

“Phil, you can’t just stand there all day. Move. It’s fine. Don’t be scared.”

 _But this isn’t like before_ , Phil wants to argue, _this isn’t like a dream where nothing makes sense and getting hurt doesn’t matter. How can it be fine? How can I not be scared? How can I move when I don’t even know where I’m going or what I’m doing?_

_It’s too much. I can’t, I can’t, I-_

“If you can’t then who will?” His mental conjuration of Dan’s voice supplies a counter argument. “Your whole life the only person who ever made the things you wanted possible was yourself. When you wanted to do something you did it, when you were too hesitant to try something you ended up trying it anyway. You made your own way in this world. You still do. This isn’t any different.”

 _Isn’t it_ , Phil thinks, his pulse high and thready in his throat. _Isn’t it different? There’s something out there I can’t see and I don’t think it wants to stage an impromptu meet and greet. I was wrong. This is impossible. I can’t take much more of this._

“Really? After everything you’ve been through in the past few days it only took you this long to forget everything I told you, everything you’d already told yourself? You’ve always been able to endure and achieve a lot more than you thought you could. You’re just freaking out again and if you’d stop doing that long enough to really take a good look at the situation, you’ll find it’s not impossible at all.”

 _It is! It is impossible!_ Phil’s brain yowls in reply and even to himself it sounds overly miserable and whiny, reduced to a destructive uncontrollable pathos hindering the ability to think of anything else but ‘freaking out.’

“You’re still alive, aren’t you? In that case, you still have a chance to move and survive. Besides, if whatever that thing is really wanted you, wouldn’t it have attacked by now?”

The suggestion stops Phil’s next automatic denial in its tracks. He pauses, catches his breath and for the first time he notices the silence. No whispery comments from the invisible figure in the dark and no complex echoes to mimic the sound of voices. Even the once ever present noise of rushing water under his feet has vanished. The water itself has thinned out to a slow, fine trickle and the walls under his palm are no longer the same type of slimy corrugated metal but the smoothly hewn surface of carved rock instead. Wherever he’d flailed his way to within the culvert it was completely different, now more like a true cave, one long abandoned by time and people. Of his newfound ‘friend’ there’s no sign and slowly his heart begins to subside back to a rhythm that, although still harried and frenetic, isn’t set to explode through his ribcage.

“You see? I told you, it’s fine. You’re alright.”

As usual, although only a fabricated product of imagination, Dan’s words exert an influence as powerful as his presence, a variety of rare strength which came from those whose primary motivations were rooted in compassion, exhibited not so much in overreaching gestures or boastful displays of affection, but in more subtle displays of care and concern. Phil looks to his left, off into the gloom. The stifling quiet of the shadows offers its own powerful influence, all of it rooted in dread and bad ideas. ‘You won’t be able to weather the storm,’ the darkness suggests, but then, inexplicably, like an automatic response from the penumbral depths of a level in his mind deeper than his subconscious where all his more spontaneous ideas and instincts resided, he thinks in reply, “I am the storm.”

It’s absurd, aggrandizing- a variety of cheesy motivational quote he might find littering his Facebook feed or the type of throwaway comment he might make to Dan about being ruler of the universe, a half ironic joke at the idea of crowning himself cosmic monarch over his own private world of thought. In abstract it makes little sense, but in the context of his fear it becomes a blinding idea, the type which carries its own brand of fervent sincerity he can’t deny.

All people were storms unto themselves, electric points of potential in an otherwise dark and strange universe, where some obstacles could only be matched with the resistive strength of a tempest. He had always been unapologetic in acting on that potential, in implementing the insistent quirks of his personality with bold colors and bright thoughts, to advertise to the world that he was present and alive, brimming with the unmitigated joy of individuality, however odd and unexpected. He had carefully cultivated every part of his life and appearance to match the person he felt he inherently was- hair dyed to a particular shade of ink dipped black, a wardrobe overflowing with vibrant colors and whimsical prints, an editing style to complement the more amusing and stranger occurrences of his life and a bedroom purposefully decorated with all the varied affects and mementos of his interests. And if any part of his appearance or mannerisms irked the sensibilities of those who demanded he be more reserved or mundane he offered no apology but a gentle refusal to compromise any part of who he was. This was what he understood it felt like to take ownership of his name and his life, to approach each day with unflinching aplomb despite all his myriad internal preoccupations and not live in constant fear of never being good enough for himself; of always missing out on who he wanted to be. In many ways then he was exactly like a storm, rushing in bold and unexpected, sweeping up those caught in the path of his laugher and commentary to leave them either baffled or delighted. In some cases he imagined it was a little of both, but it’s that latent conductive energy which daily fueled his inspiration and appetite for life. It wasn’t a mindset where doubt or anxiety could stagnate and spread for long, not when he preferred entertaining more interesting, brighter, realms of possibility and thought. It was just how he was wired, to be a thrumming axis of perpetual motion at all times. Dan most often reminded him of this in instances where anxiety and fear colluded to a flashpoint of manic chaos too overwhelming for him to endure, instances like now where his brain could only repeat the negative refrain ‘I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,’ over and over, when under different circumstances he actively worked to prove the opposite.

In the wake of his conjured pep talk however, the state of ‘freaking out,’ of giving into the tingle of panic hovering at the back of his mind, ready to incite his state of alarm into overdrive at the slightest provocation, no longer seems like an overwhelming prerogative. It’s only then, between the subsiding heave of another long breath, he’s finally able to focus and consider his only two options of staying or moving on. He’s in two minds about it, quite literally, with Dan’s voice urging him to leave and his own advocating for him to stay and wait it out.

Finding Teague is a faint hope, but not one he actually believes, not when it was more likely Teague would be able to follow the thunderous rate of his heartbeat to find him instead.

_Besides, most survivalists always warn against wandering around aimlessly when you’re lost, like the way I end up even more stranded in the middle of a shopping centre whenever I lose sight of my family for a millisecond and try to find them on my own. So I should stay here until he finds me instead._

“And how long would that take?” The illusive projection of Dan’s voice coolly interjects. “Long enough for him to find you before whatever that was before decides to make a more physical introduction? I mean, if you were going to decide how you wanted to meet your fate in here, do you want it to be while cowering in the shadows or while making an effort to escape?”

If he were going to decide how to meet his fate, Phil thinks it wouldn’t have anything to do with this tunnel or the voice at all. Literally anything else sounds better as a matter of fact, even death by hippo, but no, in hindsight staying here didn’t present such a good idea after all and the more he thinks about it the less he enjoys the idea of waiting around to see which lottery he’d win this time, the one where Teague found him first or the one where the voice did. At least moving forward came with the illusion of progress better than clinging silently to the wall at his back.

Don’t think about it, just move, he knows Dan would say.

 _What was that word he used one time,_ Phil thinks. _The one about trying to find bliss in the absence of all thought?_

Rasāsvāda.

The word occurs to him instantly just as it had done back on the train when he’d struggled to sleep in the face of overwhelming worry. He’s still not sure how exactly to employ its philosophy to full effect, but he latches on to its advice anyway as he pushes off from the wall and begins a slow, faltering pace into the void ahead.

_One foot in front of the other. Just walk, just breathe. Don’t think._

His sodden trainers keep time with each step by way of a squelching racket loud enough to advertise his position to anything within a two mile radius that wanted to find him, but after a few minutes of continued silence other than the constant wet smack of his own trainers against the floor, he decides perhaps there really wasn’t anything there after all. Maybe he’d run far enough and fast enough to lose the thing completely. It also meant perhaps he’d lost Teague as well. He doesn’t have too long to think about what he might do if he’d managed to lose Teague for good and what might happen if he were forced to meet the Court on his own, when he suddenly spots a light in the distance.  
It’s a fragile tenuous glow, but in the face of the greater thicket of shadows around him and no other waypoint to guide him, it looks more welcoming than an oasis in the desert. He zeroes in on it and quickens his pace, hoping that unlike an oasis in the desert it didn’t turn out to be a cruel mirage.

The light grows as he approaches, billowing out into a perfect square of golden light and when he’s feet away he notices the source emanating from somewhere high above his head. He cranes his neck back and is almost prepared to see a doline many thousands of feet out of his reach like in the dream, but it’s not a doline at all. There are slats of wood making up the rough edges of what he can only surmise is a trapdoor. The only access to it lies via the ancient relic of a ladder he spots fastened against the stone face wall with oxidized screws so corroded by wear and age they look like indistinguishable black lumps growing out of the rocks. He’d be willing to bet their home internet connection at its most unreliable was more stable than the ladder itself, but without any other clear way out he decides to hope for the best and give it a try anyway.

_Definitely not about to go wandering around in the dark again, not unless I really have to and I really hope I don’t have to._

He steps towards the ladder with both hands bunched into determined fists at his sides as if he meant to punch his way up instead of climbing, but then a glinting sparkle on the ground catches his eye and he stops to peer down. It’s a ring, he notes with some surprise, a sizeable one, sparkling up from the noxious muck of grime and mud surrounding it. _Pretty_ , is his first thought, _looks expensive_ is the second. It’s intricately carved with an embossed intaglio of a bird clutching a red stone, perhaps a ruby or a garnet, Phil can’t tell which, but he can tell it’s been well-kept and polished without a single scuff mark or scratch on it. It’s strange that out of everything else on the ground covered in a thick layer of sludge the ring should have escaped the same fate. It’s even stranger the way it’s perfectly balanced on top of the protruding round edge of a stone on the ground. Phil might even say it had been deliberately placed there to keep from getting dirty, but he wonders who would have the presence of mind to drop a ring so carefully and to what purpose? Even if he had a mind to pause and consider the possibilities he can’t begin to come up with any reasonable explanations. He only knows it’s too nice of a thing to remain lost down here. With that thought in mind, spurred on by an instinct he can’t explain, he leans over to pick it up and after turning it over in his fingers to feel the considerable weight of it in his palm, he quietly slips it into his jacket pocket.

He can almost hear the afterimage of Dan’s voice in his head incredulously challenging his decision to take it. “Phil…honestly, you’re the guy in the horror movie who makes the horror movie happen in the first place. Why would your first reaction to finding a discarded ring in a creepy abandoned underground shaft be to put it in your pocket??”

 _No idea_ , he thinks. _Just felt like I should, so I did. Although– this is the same kind of impulsive decision making that makes me buy stress mushrooms and oversized bags of marshmallows when I don’t really need to, so maybe practicing a tiny bit of self-control wouldn’t be such a bad idea in the future before I really do accidentally set off some kind of Samara like chain of events in the future. But it’s just a ring... How much trouble could it be?_

He turns his attention back to the ladder and comes to the immediate conclusion that compared to the ring, the rusting state of the rails and steps in front of him proved a considerably greater risk than pocketing lost jewelry. One misstep, one corroded screw crumbling under his body weight and he’d have a long way to fall before hitting the hard stone floor below. He hesitates at this idea and he’d remain frozen in place again, too unsure about taking the significant risk of a bone fracture, when he hears a faint noise echo out from the long shadows he’d left behind. It’s not a voice or the sound of footsteps. It could only be an errant plink of water, a stone resettling or just his own imagination amplifying the mundane into something terrifying, but imagined or real, dangerous or not, all thoughts of full body casts go straight out the window and he approaches the ladder in a rush, now well past the point of endurance. Leaving by any means necessary is the only priority and he’ll be glad if he never has to see a culvert, cave or any type of underground, dark tunnel of nightmares in his life again. Tentatively he grabs a rung at chest level and gives it an experimental shake to test its integrity. Despite the decrepit flakes of rust which peel off in his hand, the rung holds fast. He takes a breath, pulls himself up onto the ladder completely and waits. When nothing trembles apart under his weight, he climbs to the next rung. The ladder continues to hold fast and in a rush of confident impatience he advances up one more step and then another and then one more quickly after that.

_Right then. I’m doing this. Just hope nothing grabs my leg on the way up…_

As soon as he thinks it, the idea won’t leave his head and an itch of paranoia tickles its way down the back of his neck in anticipation of steely claws suddenly clamping down around his ankle.

_Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Rasas-however Dan pronounced it._

He proceeds in this manner, circulating between thinking about it and trying to think of anything else. The light seeping through the slats of wood above grows closer. He’s nearly there, can almost reach up and touch the trapdoor with the tips of his fingers if he tried and it’s then, with the impeccable timing of Sod’s law revisited, just as he reaches the last rung, his right foot slips off the ladder. Vertigo tips him backwards and in a wild effort to overcompensate for the lack of balance his other foot nearly follows suit, but it catches at the edge, his toes digging in reflexively at the front of his shoe to find a better grip. He’s left hanging onto the ladder by nothing more than upper body strength and the bare tenth of an inch of his left shoe struggling not to slip off the rung. If someone had taken an x-ray of him in that moment he imagines his stomach would resemble a pretzel from the way it contorts and twists inside him. His hands, clammy with sweat and rust, slip wildly for purchase and at the last minute, before he can imitate Sandra Bullock’s thrashing freefall in Gravity back down into the void below his feet, he shoves his body forward and his foot swings back onto the rung in time to steady himself.

“Too close,” he mutters breathlessly.

He’d always known his accident proneness would prove to be detrimental at some point, like stumbling over the edge of a stage or nearly burning his sock off while reaching for a pen on the stove with his foot, but not while in the life or death situation of dangling off an antiquated ladder in a secret passage under a private mansion filled with vampires. It’s more than a fair bit intimidating in retrospect, but the best he can do is mind his step, hope for the best and carry on. So thinking, he reasserts his grip, sets his feet and pushes the flat of his hand up against the square hatch of the trapdoor overhead. The wood gives a protesting creak, but otherwise it doesn’t budge. He readjusts his weight and tries again, shoving with more force and the door relents with a promising shudder. With a deep breath and one hand wrapped tightly around the last rung, he batters the door again with his shoulder and with a screeching metallic protest of unoiled hinges, the panel flips up and falls backwards onto the floor with a dull clunk. Quickly, before he can give gravity, unseen creatures or his own clumsiness a chance to pull him back, he hauls himself up to emerge out into the heavily cluttered environs of a cavernous room.  
The origin of the meager illumination which had guided him here reveals itself as an old lamp post standing beside the trapdoor. Its placement is odd, almost deliberate. That it should be on when all other lights in the room are not is odder. But his relief at having escaped doesn’t allow him a chance to pore over the idea for long, especially not when he looks down and his sense of relief is instantly replaced by dismay when he notices the aftermath of his trek through the tunnel. His clothing is a lost cause. Dark streaks of mud and other unnamed unpleasant looking stains speckle his trousers all the way from the knees to the ankles. His trainers are caked in grime and his hands are covered in swathes of the same.

_But I’m alive. Despite everything, I made it._

He feels more at ease about the prospect of waiting for Teague here. The light gives a warm sense of security he didn’t have in the bleak darkness below. And although he was essentially an unwelcome trespasser who wouldn’t be warmly received by the occupants of this house if found, it was better than being found by the unseen horror in the tunnel. He doesn’t like the idea of either scenario and both still held strong possibilities of happening, but this time he clings to the hope that Teague would be the one to find him first.

_It’s a cellar after all. Can’t be that many people out for a stroll down here, so I think I should be safe. Not that there’s a shortage of hiding places if someone should walk by. Look at all this stuff..._

Jorin hadn’t been kidding when he’d described the basement as a manner of storehouse for the Court’s off cast antiques. It’s like rummaging through an alternate version of Affleks where Pokémon collectibles and New Age supplies had been replaced by old artifacts and older furniture. Every inch of the room, from floor to ceiling, is stacked with bureaus, statues, books, miscellaneous objets d'art and great stone blocks that look as if they’d once formed part of funerary slabs or buildings from an unknown ancient civilization. He’s offered a glimpse of what their own rooms might look like one day if they didn’t invest in better storage for all the gifts, equipment and décor they accumulated annually. The light from the lamp post casts a sufficient glow that he feels confident in wandering away to investigate the myriad items around him, in numbers and variety enough to occupy his curiosity for centuries. Given the purported age of the Court members themselves, maybe that was how long these things had been down here. He moves to and fro in awed captivation, studying the obliquely exaggerated proportions of his face in an enormous silver sphere, puzzling over the use of a wooden contraption that looks like an invention da Vinci himself might have designed and peering warily at the yellow topaz eyed glare of a stuffed lion with proportions and features more intimidating than the miniature stylized version sitting placidly in his bedroom.

Before he’s aware of it he’s wandered a considerable distance away into another adjoining room. The light from the lamp he’d left behind isn’t nearly strong enough to illuminate the entirety of the space in front of him, but he’s too entranced by each subsequent find to turn back. Accompanying the collection of items in this room are a network of pipes snaking up the wall and along the ceiling in what he supposes must be the plumbing and gas lines of the house. There’s a noticeable smell here of something like damp rot or wet carpet, a lingering odor he’d once smelled many times in their flat and had merely dismissed it as coming from their next door neighbor. A fresh sense of alarm, like the tickle of paranoia which had dogged his footsteps the entire journey through the culvert, pings at the back of his mind to alert him that this smell had nothing to do with damp rot or wet carpet at all. He can’t place what it could be however. There’s only the tip of the tongue sensation where he’s close to identifying the name and yet too far off in making the connection. In the next instant he catches sight of a carved pink quartz hippo roaring silently into the air and all thoughts of suspicious smells take a backseat to rapt investigation of this anomalous marvel.

_That’s…pretty amazing._

Out of everything else on the table and around the room he can’t say why a pink hippo should be so extraordinary, but it is and he looks it over with single minded fascination.  
It’s then, without warning, the weighted grip he’d feared encountering the entire ascent up the ladder clamps down on his shoulder from behind.  
Panic reasserts itself with a vengeance. He forgets about being the storm or embracing the concept of Rasāsvāda. Not even Dan’s voice materializes to reassure him and Phil thinks maybe it was just as petrified too. Long nails like talons dig into his jacket and the fingers, cold and powerful like bands of iron, press down with unyielding force. With the same inexplicable instinct which had told him to pick up the ring, he instantly knows the hand on his shoulder doesn’t belong to Teague. The hand clenches and the demand of the pressure is unmistakable. Turn around and look at me, that grip says and slowly, painstakingly, with his heart back to frenzied and his breath frozen in his lungs, he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was supposed to have been the last and it was supposed to have been posted well back in December, but I guess there really is something to be said for that line about the best-laid plans..  
> I've lept working on this for the longest time trying to wrap everything up as succinctly as possible, as time and opportunity allowed, but it was becoming progressively more involved as I went along and it would've been impossible to post everything in one chapter.
> 
> Drafting, writing and editing it mixed with a few developments healthwise and personally made posting this chapter difficult, if almost impossible, towards the end, but I'm glad I finally managed it. I think at the very least, although writing it has been a somewhat conflicting journey, it's also been therapeutic in that it's taken my mind off things I'd rather be distracted from. It's a little like this line I read of Ray Bradbury's about writing: "While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all." It's how I feel at the moment about writing this story and how I feel watching Dan and Phil's videos in general, just an all round refreshing and different and good experience where I can focus on better things or trying to make better things possible.
> 
> I don't know if that made sense honestly or how well the delivery and tone has worked in this installment, but I hope this all still reads as somewhat cohesive and coherent.  
>  
> 
> No notes on the story this time, just hope you're all having a good day/night and as always, thank you for checking back in and devoting time to read this chapter and thank you for your continued patience in waiting for it. (I know it's not the best feeling to wait what seems like a year and a day between updates.)


	10. Resistance: Part I

 

_And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair.  
To hope and  to act, these are our duties in misfortune._

—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

Funny the particular memories one recalls with unerring clarity out of all other life experiences. Funnier still the random things which inspires those memories to resurface unexpectedly, conjured up by strange whims of circumstance and minor environmental cues. Tonight it might be the sour reek of gas lingering in the air or the moldering undercurrent of damp and age clinging to the oil stained wainscoting or the charred aftertaste of burning coals in the cumbersome brazier held by the statue behind him or it could be a mixture of all these things combined- all the uncomfortable sights and smells accompanying his walk towards the encounter waiting for him beyond the double doors at the end of the hall, but all at once, without warning, Dan is reminded of the time when at six years old he’d nearly choked to death.

It happened quickly, so quickly that if asked about it now Dan could barely remember the exact details in order, like playing back footage with too many jumpcuts and badly framed shots edited together. The only clear memory of that day remains sensorial in nature, a disordered sampling of sights and sounds; colors and shadows on high contrast– a mental image of himself seated at the kitchen table with the warmth of daylight at his back; the background noise of Róisín Murphy’s lilting vocals weaving their way through the upbeat syncopated rhythm of drums and synthesizers playing faintly from a stereo in another room; the louder sedate click of a dog’s nails across the tiled floor as Banghi, his childhood dog, had wandered over to inspect the food bowl; the tactile sensation of holding something in his hands which might have been homework, but could have easily been the more engaging button pad of a Gameboy or a Tamagotchi, while distractedly registering the taste of a boiled sweet slowly liquefying in his mouth as he’d rolled it over his teeth and across his tongue in a repetitive circle between his cheeks. The details after become too vague and frenetic for Dan to say exactly why or how it had happened, if perhaps he’d been asked a question and had taken a breath to answer or if he’d just convulsively swallowed without thinking. What he could say with certainty was that everything had been fine until it wasn’t.  In the space of a second, the mundane calm of his day had been interrupted with the bright incoherent chaos of panic and he’d been left scrabbling at his neck, clawing at the skin in a mad bid to physically dig out the outsized lump of sugar suddenly lodged in his windpipe.

His last breath had rushed out of his nose and as he’d bolted up from the chair, knocking it to the floor with a distant clatter, he’d been terrified to find himself unable to breathe at all.

 He’d gagged, mouth open in a soundless gasp, trying to force the solid mass up and out, but it remained where it was, choking him as it continued to liquefy slowly and a morbid idea had occurred to him that this might be the last thing he ever tasted on earth if he died, blacking out of existence with the trailing taste of fructose and artificial flavorings coating the back of his throat. All the popularly touted health concerns related to sweets wouldn’t apply here- no complications from tooth rot or diabetes for him, no. Instead he was about to be the next contributing statistic for legislation banning the consumption of boiled sweets for every kid his age the way children in the U.S were denied the pleasure of Kinder eggs, all because he’d failed the simple task of eating. The indignity of it had been only a passing thought eclipsed by the greater concern of not wanting to have a front row perspective in what it felt like to suffocate to death. His lungs, starved for oxygen, had already begun to burn in his chest. The pressure of raw fear building in his head had watered the corners of his eyes, blurring his vision and blending the shapes of cabinets and appliances around him into abstract swathes of color- a collection of Rothko’s on parade. Unable to make a sound other than a dry inaudible rattle he’d smacked the table in a fractured blast beat tempo for help and abruptly, like a summoned spirit, a taller shadow had appeared at his side, their figure too harshly backlit by the daylight pouring in through the windows for Dan to make out who it was.

Large arms had locked in a vice around his chest and hauled him up a good few feet above the ground, leaving his legs to dangle like a rag doll. Unprepared to suddenly be airborne, his head had lolled back drunkenly, filling his vision with the view of his struggling shadow merged with that of his phantom rescuer projected onto the kitchen ceiling like a rapidly evolving Rorschach blot. He wasn’t alone anymore, someone was here to help, but the brief consolation of company hadn’t lasted long when almost immediately the problem had slipped from bad to worse. The new angle of his neck tilted towards the ceiling at a vertical incline meant an easier slope for the sweet to roll down and wedge itself further in place, now snugly jammed in a more convenient position to strangle him faster.

 Panic had dialed up to frenzy. His hands flailed, fingers splayed into rigid claws, arms and legs jerking up and down in robotic spasms. The flickering shadow play of his silhouette on the ceiling had been replaced with a view of the back of his eyelids as his eyes had rolled back into his head.

 Then, without warning, he’d found himself suspended upside down, staring this time with diplopic clarity at a vein tendriled crack running through one tile in the floor. ( _like a tree_ , he had thought mindlessly at the time, _a dark, dead tree_. And for years after, when the trauma of the moment had long since passed into the realms of humorous anecdote, the sight of dense forests at night, of large skeletal trees crowded together in clots of twisted branches, instilled a strange, breathless impression of foreboding, an asphyxiating sense of dread and terror he could never quite place the reason for until the Blair Witch Project had allowed him the convenient reprieve of drawing more philosophical conclusions about the universal primal fear of the dark and the unknown. An explanation which had always felt compensatory at best, a thin cover for something else more deeply personal, like an intimate awareness of his own fragile mortality rooted in forgotten associations he could never fully decipher.) The sweet’s downhill trajectory had reversed, sliding ponderously out of his trachea the right way towards unobstructed, but not fast enough. Drool had flecked the corners of his mouth as he tried again and again unsuccessfully to cough. The hairline fracture in the floor had wavered from double to treble to complicated blur. A muttered grumble of a voice from above his head then, an inarticulate noise like an angry plea and the hands locked around his waist, holding him upside down, had abruptly switched tact and shaken him violently. His head had snapped forward, his molars painfully colliding with an audible snap before he’d gaped wide again and a sip of air had shot down his throat, gathered in a bubble and expelled itself back up in a retching gag.  Another violent shake, another spittle flecked retch and the force of gravity had done the rest of the work as the sweet had finally shot out of his mouth in a slick projectile under the table.

Air had rushed in to expand his lungs at a velocity so sudden and quick his first drawn breath had been painful, but he’d gulped it down in great heaving gasps anyway, not caring he was still inverted towards the floor with the blood rushing to his head to make him more lightheaded than he already felt. After another series of burning, ragged breaths, the hands holding him in place had carefully flipped him back into an upright position and he’d stumbled out of their loosening grasp to look up and find his father staring back with an expression of concern chased with mild amusement now that the crisis had passed.

“Alright, Daniel?”

Dan had only been able to nod in response, having just enough energy to give another wincing cough to clear his throat of the sickly sweet aftertaste lingering there. The question had felt largely rhetorical anyway, a calmer stand-in of dialogue to belie the fluttering pace of Dan’s heart and the subsiding heaves of his father’s chest; a way to avoid addressing the lingering vibe of disorganized panic hanging above their heads about how close Dan had skirted oblivion on the technicality of nothing but the lucky happenstance of his father’s presence and an improvised Heimlich technique better suited to a cartoon script than reality.

It’s impossible to say what exactly about his current environment has inspired the little trip down memory lane. There’s enough in the long narrow hallway to induce waking nightmares for the rest of his immortality on earth. The towering statue behind him providing the hallway’s only light source via its ominously spitting fire pit of a torch features prominently on the list. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with the hallway or the house at all and more to do with the unreliable nature of coincidence and dumb luck responsible for his survival thus far. It’s the same manner of inexplicable serendipity which appeared to favor him throughout his life, allowing him to walk away intact from encounters with clumsy, flaming knife juggling street performers and various mishaps involving escalators, cliff edges and oncoming traffic. He’d already beat impossible odds, once with Yilmaz and again with Phil, but if the third time truly was the charm then he’s not sure he wants to know how many more ‘technicalities’ of luck and coincidence he’s exhausted before his final encounter with the Court plays out. The idea won’t stop worrying at him and the longer he thinks about it the more it begins to manifest itself from an intangible state of disquietude to a physical phenomenon in the shape of an unctuous ball of air collecting in the middle of his throat as if he’d swallowed another boiled sweet ten times the size of the last one with no one around to lend a hand and shake him upside down like a half empty ketchup bottle to dislodge it. A saccharine aftertaste stings the back of his mouth to accompany the sensation and although he knows it’s only a product of his mind, a bizarre self-induced haunting brought on by a strong memory and stronger anxieties he can’t control, he has to resist the urge to lean over and gag.

A hand brushes the back of his shoulder, a brief touch of a cold palm flat against his shirt and this time he nearly does choke before realizing it’s only George walking in step behind him, apparently worried enough about his drifting posture to offer a covert gesture of concern in the only way they could communicate without Eris overhearing. In the high polish lacquered sheen of the wall to his left Dan glances over at their reflection. George meets his eyes, allowing Dan to read the pointed frown on his face intended to ask, ‘ _are you okay_?’

His father’s same rhetorical question spoken by a different person in a different situation; another show of courtesy to belie the uncomfortable awareness of them both being well beyond the help of anyone who could intervene and make things right again. In response, Dan quirks an eyebrow and twitches his mouth in a lightly cynical smile, hoping to paint an eloquent enough expression that manages to get the point across. _‘Seriously? Nothing about this is remotely okay, not from the outset up to now, but when you get right down to it I guess that’s life in a nutshell, huh? We’ve all got our long hallways and Night Courts and childhood traumas and none of us are ever really okay. But we fight to keep breathing and find ways to cope with the world and ourselves long enough to discover what ‘okay’ means to each of us personally and right now, George- mate- personally? I’m not okay. I promise. You know how the chorus goes_.’  
The first half of his subtly pantomimed answer he’s sure he’s relayed perfectly and the second half he’s just as sure has probably been lost in translation. George however only gives a quick curt nod before looking away as if he’s understood the message in its entirety. For all Dan knows, given his earlier moral dilemma, he probably does.

They continue on in silence and a low hum of nervous dread stays with him like a second shadow, dogging his footsteps with a palpable weight heavy enough to make each step into a disorienting zero gravity spacewalk. The doors ahead turn into a mirage impossible to reach as he looks at them, appearing farther away with every step forward he takes, not that he’s entirely enthused about arriving; not that he has the option to avoid it. It’s do or die this time and he tries not to think about the latter becoming the more probable outcome as he and his small strange entourage continue on their way. Besides their brief exchange of glances, George hasn’t said a word since Eris had bid him to tag along, following behind Dan in the attitude of a bodyguard bringing up the rear advance to buffer all peripheral threats, but in this dark corridor where the only threat to be found was Eris leading the way in front and her monstrous marble namesake guarding the locked passage behind them, it seems more likely George has been tasked with the unofficial assignment of making sure Dan doesn’t suddenly turn around and make a break for it. Not that his previous attempt at fleeing the house might stand a chance this time, he thinks, not when the impressionable Fergus has been replaced with Eris’s more capable and daunting presence. She herself remains smugly mute as she proceeds ahead, but the omnipresent tock of her heels against the wooden floorboards like the hands of a great clock counting down to disaster provides an apt translation for her thoughts.

Time itself remains elusive and with each atonic pulse of her stilettos striking the floor, Dan realizes he has no idea exactly how late it is. The chronology of events since his abduction to his arrival and all subsequent encounters with Fergus, George and his phone call to Phil, remains difficult to place. The evening has never seemed longer and the unabated fury of the storm shuddering the foundations of the house in a muted howl of wind and thunder gives an uneasy sense of distortion, as if the only point of relevance and reality left in the world has become the storm itself, leaving him to inhabit a state of purgatorial liminality where the progression of time had been halted until further notice. All he knows with any certainty is that he’s never been more aware of the messy business of being alive. _Or rather, of being undead_ , he thinks. It’s impossible to say which of these two warring states of being are responsible for the rush of electrified nerves prickling his skin from head to toe with a formicant itch he can’t shake no matter how hard he rubs his tied wrists together, but he’s not certain if it even matters anymore.

The past few hours have brought with them a dramatic shift in consciousness. Suddenly, the dilemma of subverting monstrous appetites and preternatural reflexes in a struggle to retain his humanity is no longer his primary concern. The urge still lurks in the back of his mind like another repressed memory waiting for the right stimulus to leap back to the fore of conscious thought with a vengeance, to drown him this time in an alarmingly satisfying tide of hunger and power, but for now it’s a wall of static on low volume, for once easily ignored.

Instead, he’s stuck with trying to wrangle the feeling of toddling along like an infant unsure of its surroundings, displaced by lack of comprehension and familiar faces, tossed into a situation leagues above his experience where survival was imperative but uncertain, especially here, surrounded by people with their own ideas for what his survival might ultimately mean. Less than an infant, it’s like being six and choking in his parent’s kitchen all over again, hoping for someone to come along and tell him things will be alright and the help he needs is only a second away from appearing when he least expects it, but the side of his brain grounded in the more realistic practicalities of self-sufficiency has already given up on expectations, either bad or good, about the encounter waiting for him in the room at the end of the hall. He’d already learned life in general had a bad habit of defying expectations anyway.  A lesson he’d carried with him from childhood in a series of mishaps spanning disastrous first dates, traumatic piano lessons and a long anticipated kiss with a crush whose pack a day smoking habit had shattered all dreams of romance and passion when he’d pulled away from her lips with a taste of cineritious grime lacing his mouth that not even a desperate rinse with toothpaste and astringent had completely succeeded in erasing, leaving him with the conclusion he may as well have upended a clogged ashtray into his mouth for the same experience.

Moments were always either less than what they appeared to be or more than one could handle. Opinions were never so diplomatically exchanged, people never as simple to understand and situations never as straightforward as he’d like them to be. Certain challenges he knew were only par for the course, he even welcomed them, if only to grant a boost of inspired motivation and eventual catharsis over having surmounted the challenge to achieve a sought after goal and thereby prove his own capabilities to himself, but some things were so harrowing, so unexpectedly strange and inexplicable, as to leave him hopelessly adrift in his thoughts, unable to utilize prior experiences or a haphazard quirk of innovation to guide him. He’d heard the term zemblanity once, the apparent coined descriptor meant to define the antithesis of serendipity, where lucky coincidences were replaced by unforeseen disappointments or disaster, the kind of awkward mishaps and public misadventures which liked to plague him throughout his life. And if it was true there was a word for everything, even the most indescribable aspects of human nature, then he thinks ‘zemblanity,’ or the philosophy it meant to impart, more than applied in this case. Even when acting with an abundance of care, life always had a way of offering nasty surprises and he tries not to imagine what manner of nasty surprise might be waiting for him before the night came to an end. It’s already difficult enough to stop envisioning what might happen to Phil if Ashton and Lucy succeeded in finding him, especially with the previous close call in the alley as an uneasy frame of reference, compounded further by Dan’s inability to intervene this time. Whatever fluke of good fortune had allowed him and Phil to advance this far without reprisals seems to have run its course, leaving them both stranded to their own devices to figure a way out or risk never leaving at all.

 _Well, unless the house decides to collapse in on itself, saving me the trouble of stressing over eventualities_ , Dan thinks, as another potent blast of wind shrieks along the eaves and minutely shivers the floor beneath his feet with an accompanying boom of thunder like a distant cannon blast.

The only other time he’d felt something similar was when he and Phil had navigated the tightly packed corridors beneath Wembley Arena on their way to interview One Direction. A memory punctuated by the resounding echoes of fans bellowing their enthusiasm in thunderous tones like shrieks of audio feedback amplified to incredible effect, forceful enough to seep past the densely layered steel and concrete foundations. Some of the loudest examples of their fervor had shuddered the pipes overhead with vibrations Dan would have been surprised hadn’t registered as low scale seismic activity. Then, just like now, his nerves had been stretched to a thin point of tension as he’d proceeded on in a surreal daze, trying not to let the anxious energy of the crowds overwhelm him as he’d clutched a sheaf of hastily scribbled on A4 papers, testament to a last minute rush of brainstorming questions and challenges in the taxi ride over, hardly able to believe what was happening and unsure of what might happen next as they neared the glorified loo of a green room where the interview was meant to occur. Time had seemed to falter and slow back then as well, lurching to a heart pounding stop as the band members had filed in one by one, filling the small space with the enormity of presence. In their wake the ambient chaos of the crowds outside had dulled to a deafening silence, drowned out by the louder racket of Dan’s pulse in his ears. What had once seemed surreal was now suddenly too real and Dan had been more so struck by the significance of realizing, with the group’s arrival, he and Phil had been suddenly elevated from the role of simple onlookers to officially commissioned interviewers where one badly received question or awkward physical exchange would be forever memorialized in a recorded video clip on the internet as a lasting legacy of failure consigned to posterity.

It had taken some amount of restraint to not further crease the papers in his hands as he’d thought this over and before the opportunity to interview them at all had been yanked away by one impatiently Rolex tapping man in a suit who might have been a security guard meant to ferry the group out of sight of the general public and novitiate employees for Radio 1, Dan had overcome the high octane suspense of the moment in time to plead his case with a garbled run-on sentence of an introduction that miraculously had managed to translate well enough for Harry Styles to nod and extend a formal greeting. After a few moments in which it seemed the man in the suit might shatter the glass face of his watch if he continued to drill on it any longer with the subtle force of a jackhammer, the interview had successfully concluded without mishap or fatality, even with the pipes still shuddering in their fastenings by the exulted shouts of departing fans with stores of excitement to spare despite the concert having already come to an end. The satisfaction of success had stayed with Dan weeks after, supplemented by ideas for how it could have gone better and the extraordinary relief of it not having gone worse. Out of all the understated lessons he’d been given for life defying expectations, he’d taken that one instance as a more optimistic example of the rewards inherent with facing uncertain risks and persevering despite all odds. But as another grumbling detonation of thunder overtakes the house, Dan considers maybe the two circumstances weren’t exactly on the same level. Meeting One Direction and getting an up close view of Liam Payne’s newly shorn head held none of the lethal connotations of meeting a vampiric Court with a reputation for manipulation and murder, let alone walking towards the encounter without so much as a badly jotted word of advice on a dog-eared sheet of paper as a reference for how to address said council of murderous manipulators. Suddenly, the prospect of having a social gaffe forever shared on the internet as a haunting reminder of his own incompetence seems unimportant, almost welcome, by contrast of having the Court execute him on the spot for being much too ‘smart mouthed’ as Eris had warned.

 _At the same time, it’s the only defense I have left_ , he thinks. _If this is where it ends, if this is how we go down, then fuck it._ _Maybe I won’t be able to physically stand against them, maybe I might not even be able to change whatever happens next, but I’m not going to be quiet about it. I’m not going to compromise my life to please their threats or demands. I’ve been through enough just to stand down now. I’m scared and I don’t understand everything’s that’s happened or might still happen next, but if I can’t walk away then I’m not backing off._

It’s the same promise he’d made himself since enduring Eris’s antagonistic tête-à-tête in the car, an unwavering pledge of self-reliance and opposition only reinforced after setting his eyes on the house and its unsavory inhabitants. It’s a conviction which pulses with the same racing beat of a heart that once used to be only human. However, a low hum of nervous dread remains with him like a second shadow despite his best efforts to ignore it, dogging his footsteps with a palpable weight heavy enough to make each step forward into a disorienting zero gravity spacewalk. Maybe his heart was no longer tempered by human biology but the rest of his nerves remained wired to human emotions. Or perhaps fear was just a primal, instinctive creature of an impulse lurking in every living thing, be they predator, human or something other- a reaction not easily dismissed no matter how powerful or confident one tried to be. Maybe even Eris sauntering ahead with straight backed poise also experienced fear in the right circumstances. He remembers how she’d looked at him in the car for the briefest of moments when he’d snarled his contempt in a balanced tone of cold ire, catching her off guard after she’d perhaps been expecting him to lash out mindlessly or shrink away from her instead. Immortal didn’t necessarily mean invulnerable and although she lauded herself as the gleefully callous monster it didn’t mean she couldn’t still be taken unawares.

Maybe, if he played his cards right, if he chose his words well, he might be able to catch the entire Court unawares by defying their own expectations for what he might do or say and thereby gain one last chance at escape before it was too late for him and Phil both.

 _As long I’m alive, I still have a chance_. _As long as I have a voice to speak I can fight back_.  
He reiterates this declaration to himself over and over in his head to concentrate on something other than the nervous mix of frustration, fear and uncertainty marching down the backs of his arms in a sensation that’s elevated itself from crawling itch to needlepoint tingling across his skin, although he wonders if that might not just be the ropes cutting off circulation to his arms above the elbow.

Behind his self-professed mantra another thought repeats itself to exhaustion, a baser subconscious mumble of sound he can’t control which says, _things will not work out things will not work out things will not work out._ It’s only his nerves at play again, pestering him with a typical knee jerk response of foreboding over the idea that he, as one person on his own, could ever face such a complex situation head on and survive. And he knows in the future, in a more idealistic timeline in which he has done exactly that, survived and surmounted all obstacles; overthrown conflicts and enemies including his own negative perceptions of self, he’ll look back with retrospective wisdom and realize perhaps there hadn’t been much to worry about after all, that he on his own had been more than enough to face all opposition and his younger self should have just relaxed and allowed life to unfold according to natural circumstance, no matter how terrifying or ambiguous the outcome had appeared at the time.

Easier said than done though, he supposes, no matter if you were called to face a tribunal of vampires or merely dealing with the accoutrements of adulthood, or rather with all the responsibilities and difficult decisions which came with trying to exert personal agency over one’s own life for a change.

 Another step, another plodding trod towards a room that’s never seemed further away and too close for comfort. He thinks things would feel exponentially better if he could feign aloofness; replace his current self with another version better suited to handling the situation with the same graceful swagger and coolly indifferent composure as Eris. He envisions it clearly, his head held high, self-possessed in every gesture and offhand glance, resolute of courage and intellect; unequivocally assured in his own abilities to meet any confrontation without the fear of stumbling over himself and his words. But like all mental projections, the reality is often less simple and straightforward than imagination portrays. The ropes snake around his wrists in painful twists of knots like branching vines, tugging and dragging across his skin in a burning reminder of just how not assured or in control of anything he truly was. It’s a back and forth argument between his will and his fear and the dark walls of the corridor encroaching on either side like a tomb doesn’t help.

 _Stupid_ , he thinks and shakes his head in a silent reproach at himself to stop being so overly dramatic. It was only a house after all, just an ostentatiously decorated spectacle of a manor that would put the Landgraab family estate to shame, but at the same time he knows it’s not only just a house, just as he was not only just Dan Howell, not only just all the popularly established archetypes encompassing old in-jokes, images and words associated with that name, but something more than that, some _one_ more than all his fears and inhibitions and new predatory instincts combined. Nothing was what it appeared to be on the surface. Nothing had ever been and it hurts his head to think about it, to have a better understanding of just how the entirety of his life had taken on new complexities to rival those he already struggled to embrace and define.

In his mind’s eye the house remains a vault, a tomb, a staging ground for an audience with a covert enclave of people who had seen London rise and fall through eras of pestilence, wars, uprisings and industrialization- a group of hardened grandeval creatures turned self-appointed arbiters of fate. His jailors, judge and jury, charged with deciding if he would be afforded the same dubious privilege as overseer of eternity at their side or whether he might face a penalty worse than death instead. Hard not to be overly dramatic when the situation amounted to exactly that.

He’s so lost to his thoughts, hyper focused on the grim implications despite his best efforts to ignore them, that at first he doesn’t notice the small hunched over shadow slinking low across the floor towards him until a set of sharp teeth abruptly scrape the fingers of his dangling left hand and catch hold with a loose but decidedly wet grip.

The strangling knot of air caught in his throat instantly evaporates in the face of the choked scream that bolts out of his mouth as he yanks his hand away in a rush. Undeterred, the amorphous white blur advances in hot pursuit, equipped with a collection of equally white teeth protruding out of its mouth to retrieve his hand again.

With visions of xenomorphs dominating center stage in his thoughts; unable to make sense of what he’s seeing past the blinding haze of alarm telling every muscle in his body to flee, Dan scrambles backwards, straight into George who gives a muffled, ‘oomph!’ of surprise and in the confusion to understand what’s happening, they both nearly go toppling over to the floor. Dan flails for something to hold onto on the way down, but the ropes sandwiching his hands together make it impossible to grab onto anything for support. He ends up flinging both arms over to awkwardly claw at a hanging tapestry on the wall, exerting the full force of his strength on the weighted metal brackets to help right himself until the fastenings bend to within an inch of toppling over the whole piece with him included. The shadow closes in fast and he's ready to climb up the tapestry to the ceiling if need be when Eris whirls around to stare in wide eyed bewilderment at the commotion.

“What the _hell_ is wrong with-”

She cuts off short and glances down at the floorboards, then back up to George and Dan’s desperate rebalancing act, then down at the floor again.

“Incredible.” She sighs. “A vampire- made by the oldest, most powerful and feared of our kind- scared witless by nothing more than a dog. What a great selling point of a first impression.”

“A…dog?” Dan catches his breath long enough to take a proper look at the white blob trotting towards him and is finally able to make out a pair of pert fuzzy ears, a shiny black nose, four mincing paws and the wagging feathered fan of a tail to confirm that yes, his alien attacker is absolutely of the canine variety.

“Oh, it’s a dog,” he repeats faintly with a note of self-conscious embarrassment. At the same time, said dog once more delicately clamps its teeth around his fingers and freezes in place, all the while panting through the grinning curve of its mouth. “Er, hello,” Dan murmurs down to it, caught up short for anything else better to say in the situation and the motor of a tail promptly ratchets up speed to resemble an off-kilter metronome.

No need to guess what’s sparked another memory to surge up to the surface of his conscious thoughts as his family dog, Colin, comes to mind. Although the dog in front of him bears no physical resemblance to Colin at all, a compact lop-eared Tibetan terrier with a bearded muzzle and the level stately demeanor of an old soul who had gone on to replace his previous dog, Banghi, as the family pet. This dog is a different breed than either Colin or Banghi, with a taller, sturdier build, a profusion of sleek, white fur and a lean vulpine head. Yet, both this dog and Colin share a singular bright eyed gaze of knowing awareness, as if they’d come from a special class of canines who not only understood the world according to the nature of their species but also contained a depth of ingenuity to surpass that; an uncanny ability of perception so beyond their kind as to be nearly human. But if there’s anything more behind the intentions of the dog mouthing his hand in a humid grasp that doesn’t show signs of letting up any time soon, it remains open to interpretation. For the moment, the dog simply appears content to stare up at him in energetic glee and Dan finds himself content to stand there for the rest of eternity and let it.

“That’s just Cavall.” George clears his throat and tugs his clothing back into place as he straightens up. “He’s harmless.”

“Cavall?” As soon as the name leaves Dan’s mouth, the tail’s velocity increases to a near invisible blur.

“Yes, a noble name for an otherwise unremarkable creature.” Eris smirks. “Lethe occasionally forgets and calls him ‘Pringles’ as it’s what he most likes to eat.”

“Right. That– can’t be healthy,” Dan says.

Eris shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any interest in animals to become their nutritionist. The staff cares for Cavall anyway. They’ve been doing so since he showed up on the grounds three years ago on a night much like this one. I remember Fergus thought it was a Gytrash at the time.”

At Dan’s puzzled look, she continues. “An old hand-me-down of a ridiculous English superstition about a dog shaped spirit which, depending on the story, was either a harbinger of destruction or a benevolent guide to lost travelers at night. Fergus apparently ascribed to the former translation. He was terrified. Said we couldn’t let it near the house, let alone inside. Incredible, isn’t it?” She shakes her head and laughs.  
“Living here with beings like us and he’s more concerned about a ghostly mongrel bringing the place down around our ears with its presence alone. But then, that’s Fergus’s supreme stupidity at work. The others thought it would be funny to keep a so-called fearsome legend as a pet, train it as a guard dog to keep curious interlopers away, but you can guess how well that went.” She finishes dryly and gives a cursory wave at the still grinning, rapidly wagging, harbinger of destruction with its mouth resolutely locked around Dan’s hand.

“Uh…so, out of curiosity…what type of dog…?”

“Why? Looking to get one?” Eris raises an eyebrow. “He’s a Danish Spitz. A breed apparently renowned for being clever, beautiful, courageous and affable to a fault, which also makes him extraordinarily useless at being anything better than a throw pillow.”

 _What an amazing throw pillow then_ , Dan thinks.

“I’d have been rid of him ages ago, but curiously, Cavall’s the only dog to ever tolerate our presence without howling its head off like a mad thing, which is also why we thought he’d be ideal for security detail. I don’t know if courage really is a mark of the breed or if he’s merely so thickheaded not even his sixth sense works properly, but I and the others found him to be interesting enough of an anomaly to keep him, if only in the capacity of a talking piece. Sounds a bit like you, come to think of it...”  
Eris gives her signature leering smile of arterial red lipstick framing a set of white fangs sharper and longer than the ones gently dimpling his fingers and Dan glances away.  
“Of course, we’re all hoping you’ll be more efficient than a lap dog in the end. After all this trouble it’d be a shame for them to decide Cavall is more indispensable than you.”

 _I mean, given he’s a dog, I’d say the odds are already stacked in his favor_. Dan looks down to Cavall and smiles. If possible, the tail’s whirring speed grows faster.

Eris turns back and resumes her stalking tread towards the door, signaling the abrupt end of their brief interlude as she beckons over her shoulder with a crook of her finger for Dan and George to follow.

 _Back to it then_ , Dan thinks as he falls in line with a quiet sigh. He expects Cavall to let go as soon as they start walking now that the giddy high of introductions has been exhausted, but his hand remains in Cavall’s custody and as they continue on, with his new companion’s paws keeping pace with a rapid _click click click_ across the floor, Dan gets the strange, but persuasive impression that maybe the odd greeting isn’t a funny quirk of behavior but more that the dog is attempting to improvise its own version of consolation and his mouth around Dan’s hand is simply a stand-in for the way someone might warmly lay their fingers on the back of a friend’s hand in a show of solidarity. It brings to mind Colin again and how he would always end up positioning himself on top of the backrest of the couch when Dan visited, allowing himself to be used as a cushion to lean on, usually in moments when Colin sensed Dan needed a quiet reprieve where they could settle calmly in each other’s company. It was uncanny how Colin simply _knew_ , typically making his diagnosis via one considering, soulful stare followed up by a decided sniff as if confirming something for himself before winding his way across the couch and up behind Dan’s head where he would remain, curled up and content, a warm, reliable presence that would only leave when Dan moved away first. As a general rule, dogs of all breeds and sizes were exceptional in Dan’s eyes, but some possessed a striking ability to empathize more than most, reacting in ways that were unusually sensitive and too deliberately calculated to be coincidental. Cavall could have easily decided to tug at the ropes around his wrists instead, following the example of all dogs whose temperaments were geared towards finding any available opportunity for entertainment or attention, but the deliberate way he ignores the knotted coils suggests he understands what Dan needed right now was reassurance more than diversion; an offering of friendship in a place where the presence of the one person he cared for most was denied to him. It’s a bizarre idea, one he’s not sure he entirely believes, but the tender pressure on the back of Dan’s fingers has a definite calming effect and as the doors surge up in front of him, darkly foreboding in size and design, he realizes the choking sensation of trapped air in the middle of his throat has completely disappeared.

Eris raps once on the doors with the back of her knuckles and the sound resonates in the room beyond with echoing reverberations not unlike the rumbles of thunder outside. Silence falls for a long moment after, broken only by the racket of the storm and Cavall’s little pants of breath, but then, a dull thud comes from the other side of the door like a passive aggressively returned knock and Eris rolls her eyes.

 “They’re bored again. I can’t say if that’s a good thing or a bad thing in your case, but I guess we’ll see soon enough.” She crooks her finger once more at Dan to follow and without further hesitation opens the heavy iron plated doors with an effortless push of one hand. They swing wide on a chorus of creaking hinges and coast to a slow ungainly stop to reveal a great chamber double the size of all the rooms Dan had glimpsed previously on his impromptu tour through the house. The ceiling soars high above his head, the perfect height to accommodate the grand monstrosity of a bright chandelier hanging there, festooned with diamond shards of faceted glass and flickering candles, much larger and opulently designed than the one he’d seen in the foyer when he’d first arrived.

 _It’s like staring at some abstract model of the sun,_ he thinks. _But maybe that’s the joke_. _Since they can’t be out in it themselves they make an artificial one to have the same effect without burning their faces off. On the other hand, if they ever decide to start filming videos in here they’ll never need to buy a lighting kit_.

The stark white paint treatment around the room and the grandly scaled fireplace with a blaze of churning sparks reflecting off the chandelier in a bright glare only heightens the effect, contrasting with the murky atmosphere of the dark hallway behind him. The fireplace itself is the only thing he can see with any clarity at first, not that it’s hard to miss, standing out as the pièce de résistance with its enormously proportioned structure bristling on all sides with painfully complex embellishments of rocaille, every inch of which is studded with nacreous pearls and gleaming shards of white quartz. There are also large stones in the decorative collage and something about the uncanny deliberateness of their rounded shape draws his attention. He stares for a moment longer before realizing the ‘stones’ are actually dozens of bleached skulls embedded in the mixture of pearl laced grout and mortar. It’s impossible to tell if they’re real, but considering the flair for first impressions established throughout the rest of the house he’s almost certain they must be.

 _Haute couture for catacombs- get on that, McQueen_, he thinks, but at the same time the idea only cements his earlier uneasy impression of the house being a tomb. Even with the grandeur of the fireplace and the Grecian statues scattered in every corner, (along with barred windows in the shape of what he’d once termed “death cathedral windows’ on seeing the exact same design in Phil’s old family home, a place he’d always jokingly referred to as haunted) the room has the clinical sterility of an operating theater, every inch of space covered in an impossibly white tint meant to blind him like a headache. White chairs, white frames, white moldings, white filigree, white statues, white curtains- the only hint of color to be found lies in the sprawling mural on the ceiling leagues above his head depicting grotesque figures framed by snaking arabesques, including hump backed red eyed gargoyles, animalian grotesqueries with leering maws and drooling snouts, dining tables choked with plates of gutted fish and rotting fruit, extravagantly dressed aristocrats with voids for eyes and fangs for teeth; all sharing space with other stranger, nameless oddities of form that look as if they’d walked over from a Bosch painting to join in with the rest of the hellish dinner party.  Everything else below the macabre world in the mural is devoid of color and personability- a palatial, artic landscape about as cold as snow itself despite the blaze roaring in the fireplace.

Dan finds himself unable to see much of anything through the brightness in front of him, let alone the dog right at his feet, who blends in to the white cedar floor panels, leaving only his glossy black nose, dark eyes and the soft pink hue of his inner ears and lolling tongue as his most distinguishable features noticeable at first glance. He blinks hard to adjust his eyes, but it’s uncomfortable to look anywhere. It’s the same feeling he’d experienced when the first searing rays of morning light had spilled through the window in Phil’s room, albeit this time without the risk of immolation to worry about.

_It’s like someone just changed the contrast on a camera up to maximum. I mean, sure, I’m all about those minimalist, monochromatic color schemes as much as the next guy, but talk about overkill... Then again, ‘overkill’ is pretty much their modus operandi here._

He blindly follows Eris as she proceeds ahead, taking care not to tread on Cavall’s paws accidentally, but once he steps foot over the threshold Cavall suddenly releases his hand and darts to the side with a terse warning bark. Immediately, an instinctual alarm of self-preservation primes every nerve in Dan’s body with the overwhelming reflex to do the same in avoiding the oncoming threat his brain registers first before his eyes do.

He barely joins Cavall in dodging to the right before something sharp and metallic whickers past his cheek with the speed of a bullet and buries itself in the door frame with a loud thud.

“Tch. His reflexes are too slow.”

A basso rasp of a desultory voice speaks up and as Dan’s eyes slowly begin to accommodate themselves to the glare, he makes out a black clothed figure sat behind the sprawling length of a crudely medieval ironwood banquet table in the middle of the room. As he continues to squint, preemptively tensing for another sharp object to come sailing at his forehead, the figure leans backwards in their high-backed wooden chair and props their feet onto the table, revealing a pair of ankle high leather boots which position themselves between a vase of white lilies and a large decanter filled to the brim with a crimson liquid Dan can already smell from the door is blood. There are two other people seated at the table as well, spaced out well away from each other with a row of more empty high backed chairs between them, but it takes another minute before Dan can see the group clearly. He can tell however that they’re staring at him. The weight of their scrutiny falls on him like a magnetic pulse as they scan him over Eris’s shoulder. There’s no other scent in the room to help him guess their thoughts or intentions save for the strong waft of blood on the table and the scarce traces of petrichor and gas mingling in an ever present odor through the air. But there’s another quality about the atmosphere in this room, something not rooted in a smell but a definite vibe, like an electric current tingling the nape of his neck with an admixture of curiosity and another heavier, ominous feeling of danger. Although, the last one he supposes was just a natural consequence of having something thrown with lethal speed at your head as an unconventional welcoming gift.

“Considering you haven’t skewered his face I’d say his reflexes are fine,” Eris says. She reaches behind Dan’s head like a magician about to pull a coin from his ear and yanks out the large razor tipped dart buried deep in the wood molding around the door. Dan turns to look behind him and is dully amazed to find the entire door frame, from floor to ceiling, is bristling with hundreds more, all of them sticking out in a forest of small metal spikes like porcupine quills along with pockmarked holes where others had once found their mark. It then occurs to Dan that the ‘knocking’ thud which had answered Eris earlier must have come from one of these darts, apparently thrown at the door in lieu of calling out a formal invitation for them to enter.

“I understand you’re bored, but maybe try using something other than his head for target practice. It’ll be difficult for him to answer to us if you render him incapable of answering at all.” Eris flicks the dart in a vicious arc back towards its point of origin and the figure at the table doesn’t flinch for a second as they casually reach out with one hand to pluck it from the air.

“Big talk from someone who was ready to tear his mouth off with your nails. Don’t forget, I know what you’re like, Eris and I know how you like to play, especially with mice like this one.”

The owner of the deep rasped voice finally comes into focus as someone with an intimidatingly built physique. The kind of muscle toned build on par with the statue of Achilles in Hyde Park which Dan remembered passing on one memorable occasion during an attempt at an early morning jog when he’d quipped how “particularly fit” the statue had looked, prompting Phil shadowing alongside him to reply with a cheeky lopsided smile, “yes, it is actually.” Dan could almost believe that same statue had come alive and walked off its plinth to meet him here now. The only difference is the figure’s black hair cropped into a neat utilitarian burr cut instead of the ubiquitous Greco-Roman curls and a square jawed face stippled with deeply furrowed scars, evidence perhaps of old injuries they’d received as a human and had never healed after becoming a vampire. The sleeveless flowing black garment the figure wears, a seemingly modern take on a Roman style tunic, prominently displays a set of muscled arms with hillocked biceps that look as if they could crush a rock between them in a simple flex. One hand dangles out of view at their side as they continue to sway backwards in the chair without any fear of losing balance. In their other hand the caught dart balances between thumb and pointer finger, lining up for another strike. As Dan peers closer he notices a small collection of darts lying on the table in a disarrayed bundle like a strange cache of ammunition ready to be fired at the closest available surface, with his forehead currently on the market as the prime choice of bulls-eye.

“However, even for a mouse, he doesn’t look like much does he?” The figure goes on to say.

Dan barely has time to react before the dart flickers through the air again in a quick-fire streak of silver. The wind of its passage parts the top layers of his fringe and a half second after he hears the solid thunk of colliding metal and wood as it embeds itself back in the doorframe.

 “This is Makhai, long lived praetor turned pub darts champion,” Eris says, introducing the figure to Dan with an exaggerated twirl of her hand. “Not much for conversation, but he can hit a ton 80 before you can blink.”

“A mild jab at best, she must be in a good mood tonight.” Makhai twirls another dart over his knuckles in a series of agile pirouettes, nodding to Dan in begrudging acknowledgement of his presence. “And of course you’ve met our Eris, long lived sower of discord and malcontent.”

Eris theatrically bows to accept his glowing praise and laughs. She then goes to join the others behind the banquet table and dismissively flaps a hand at George to close the doors of the room behind them. They come together with a heavy echoing clunk like two great boulders sealing off a cave entrance. His task of unofficial security guard for the moment complete, George swiftly walks behind the table to stand off at a distance behind Eris’ chair, arms crossed behind his back like a soldier at ease, his gaze trained off into the middle distance, once more taking up his initial position as the ‘hired help’ who only spoke or moved when asked to. As Dan remains behind to stand alone in front of the table with Cavall parked at his heels, the other two unnamed figures staring at him begin to come into sharper focus as well.

 One of them resembles a wizened judge with the black robes to match and a face harsher than Makhai’s, with a pontificating upturn to the nose and a beetle-browed countenance that reminds Dan of every strict no nonsense teacher that had ever warned him about saying a single word out of line in class no matter if it was to debate a salient point counter to the teacher’s lecture or simply asking to use the loo. The other person sat three chairs down idly kicking their feet under the table, with a frizzled shock of unkempt straw colored hair and a voluminous purple shirt tucked around their bird boned frame in swathes of wrinkled fabric, appears much less imposing. The expression on their face is more pleasant than the old judge’s ‘serious business’ demeanor, but there’s something off about the fixed smile on their face, a lilting, not quite centered look that’s difficult to read. It gives Dan pause although he’s not sure why- if it might be his new primal instincts picking up on a physical cue pinging too far below the periphery of his conscious to name or if it might be another covert bellwether of menace once more alerting him to an impending threat he can’t see, but something warns him off from underestimating this person too quickly; that behind the foggy thousand yard stare lurks a deep-seated and brutal cunning.

“And so here’s the rest of us,” Eris says. “The even longer lived Aeacus of the disapproving jowls who’d like to fancy himself our lordly prime minister; And lastly, there’s Lethe who’s…well, really not quite sure who she is anymore, isn’t that right, dear?” Eris leans over to smile at the figure in the baggy shirt who nods and continues to stare at Dan while resting her chin on the heels of her palms.

After enduring a long evening of pent up anxiety and doubt, after imagining crowds of leering eldritch creatures gathered in a formal tribunal like an apocalyptic parliament of the dead ready to chime in unison for his head on a silver plate, he’s left with a curiously anticlimactic feeling at seeing the four members of the Night Court gathered in front of him. He has no doubt of their power or the danger they pose, but in the wake of all the anguished moments spent wondering what surprise the theory of ‘zemblanity’ would present to him in ways more terrible than every worst case scenario he’d already wrestled with in his head, he finds himself thinking, “is that all?” and doesn’t realize he’s said it aloud until Eris laughs.

“What were you expecting? An audience with Judge Rinder?”

“Er…sort of, yeah.” Dan shrugs.

 “You see us in our diminished state,” Makhai says. “Centuries ago- centuries longer than even that- we were numerous. But through coups, defection, disinterest and murder we dwindled from one hundred archons to only nine strong. And now, well-” he gestures to his cohorts. “We’re all that remain.”

“There are other courts in other countries, all with their own customs and rules and archons, all united under a synarchy of common interest, but for a time the Court in Europe, specifically here in London, was the most powerful and influential of all of these.” Eris picks up where Makhai leaves off. “But one hundred of us in power is too many to be getting on with, too many dissenting opinions and financial assets to be budgeted and accounted for; too many people all with their own ideas for how things should be run, too many opportunities for treachery in the ranks. You know how it goes, two’s company, three’s a crowd and one hundred is a hierarchical nightmare, especially when everyone wants to be the supreme authority dipping their hands into the pot for a little more wealth and social standing than everyone else. And so, to mitigate our losses and consolidate our strengths, some…cutbacks were made, of course.”

 _Of course_ , Dan thinks wryly, certain he understands exactly what kind of cutbacks she means given her proclivity for misfortune and disaster and doubly certain that out of all these ‘cutbacks’ she’d never think to count herself among them.

“But we eventually narrowed down our strongest and most capable into nine archons and for a time that was enough,” Eris says. “We held uncontested power. No one challenged us.”

“Looks like other ‘cutbacks’ had to be made if you’re all that’s left.” Dan ventures a guess and Eris nods.

“Nine of us remained, one of whom, Yilmaz, was as good as a ghost. She sides with no one but herself and when she did show her face it was only to frustrate us rather than work with us. She’s an indomitable presence I’ve always respected, but given her transient allegiance, she never really counted as one of us. Another three archons eventually outgrew their use and needed to be…’retired,’ so to speak. Ashton and the other stewards took care of them.”

“Three little piggies who went to market, three little piggies who never came home.” Lethe speaks up for the first time, forming each word into a canting pitch of a song and her dark drifting stare never once leaves Dan’s eyes.

“And the last one who remained in our group was Jorin,” Makhai says. “Our little self-appointed critic, a hypocrite of the highest degree with too much to say and not enough depth of character to make his long running monologues worth listening to, who decided to leave on his own before I had a chance to excuse him myself.” He twirls the dart in his hand like a flick knife.

“And now there’s you. You, you, you.” Lethe segues once more into her tuneless melody, but mid-lyric she trails off and frowns, leaning forward in her seat with a sudden pressing concern. “Um…so, I’ve been meaning to ask- who are you again?”

Dan falters for a reply, but before he can say anything Makhai interrupts to answer for him.

“He’s the newly arrived irritant. The accidental celebrity. The half bit new blood we’re meant to babysit.” Makhai punctuates each pronouncement with a lazily thrown but lethally aimed dart at Dan’s head. As each small missile zips through the air Dan stumbles and ducks out of the way, narrowly avoiding the threat of a helix piercing as one skims past his ear. They pepper the doorframe in unison to join the rest and on an unseen signal from Makhai, George silently goes over to pull each dart free and walks behind the table to hand them back.

Eris sighs. “This is Daniel Howell, Lethe. We were just discussing him before. Try to keep up, please. I don’t want to have to repeat this for the rest of the evening.”

“Oh… _Ohhh_.” Lethe’s hand flies to her mouth, mortified. “That’s right. It’s Daniel. I’m very sorry. I forgot again. How do you do?”

Caught off guard by the abrupt show of courtesy, Dan replies automatically without thinking. “I- er, alright I guess.”

“Not for long, I don’t think,” Lethe says and looks genuinely sorry to have to mention it. “It’s not very nice to be where you are, you know. The last time we gathered like this I had to do an extraction and on top of being unpleasant for everyone it made a terrible mess.”

 “Extraction?”

Eris waves off the question as having little importance. “A steward was accused of theft- the usual story of someone with a bit more brass than the rest testing the waters to see what they could get away with before moving on to better pursuits than pawning off some old antiques behind our back. We found out and punished him accordingly. He stole a treasure, we stole one back. An extraction for an extraction. Which just means Lethe took the steward’s left arm off at the shoulder.”

Dan blinks. “Oh...”

“ _You_ haven’t stolen anything, have you?” Lethe leans further over the table, her tone dipping from earnest, sympathetic concern to an implacable note of flat murder.

“Er-no, no, nothing,” Dan says quickly.

Lethe’s frown instantly swaps out to a broad sunny smile and she plops backwards in her chair, the preponderance of frizzy hair on her head bouncing along with the motion like windblown tumbleweed. “Oh, well then, that’s good! I’m glad. Things are looking up for you.”

Dan thinks her opinion is open to strong debate, but he relaxes into the relief of knowing his limbs weren’t in danger of being estranged from the rest of his body.

 _Well, for now at least,_ he thinks _._

Eris pours herself a glass from the decanter brimming with blood on the table, sniffing it like a sommelier testing a fine wine’s bouquet, before turning back to Makhai. “You’ve always laid into Jorin for being the harsh critic but you’re harsher than either him or me combined. I understand your misgivings, but this isn’t just any half bit new blood we’re talking about. This is _Yilmaz’s_ new blood, remember.”

Makhai scrunches his face up into a disdainful scowl. “Should that impress me? Dropping her name doesn’t count for much, not in his case.”

“You haven’t even crossed a single word with him yet.”

“He’s _an entertainer._ ” Makhai pronounces the word as if naming a virulent disease. “I don’t need to speak to any of them to know they’re all cut from the same cloth. Even still, if he were an actor or comedian I’d give him some credit, but no, he’s a strange hybrid of a public spectacle that tows the middle ground between a fool and a narcissist. The kind of village idiot we used to jeer at when Bedlam was still open as a spectator sport to witness the vagaries of the deranged. He’s an accident of circumstance and luck, that’s all. The same reason why he’s here tonight, because he had the fool’s luck of stumbling into immortality; because Yilmaz has a soft spot for the theatre and performers with weak spines like him.”

 _Alright, easy now, captain cranky,_ Dan thinks. _You wouldn’t write me off so quickly if you knew I once memorized the entire periodic table by making it into a song and I can successfully put on a pair of skinny jeans without turning the pockets inside out. How’s that for credit?_

“Of course, here we go...” Eris gives a forbearing sigh. “This is the same argument we had about Shakespeare. You had nothing but contempt for him before you saw a single play just because he had a reputation as the public’s playwright.”

“I made that argument because the rest of you wanted to bring him into the fold and turn the ‘illustrious bard’ into an archon of the Court. Lethe was the one who wanted to do it as I recall, mainly because, in her words, he was, ‘ _such a nice man_ ,’ which should say something about how ridiculous the whole plan was from the start.”

“It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood.” Lethe interrupts with a listing smile.

“Yes and just like Macbeth you will have blood and plenty of issues to go along with it,” Makhai says wryly. “Romantics and performers have their place, but it’s not with us.”

Eris rolls her eyes. “Not everyone has to be a hardened gym rat of a warrior in their physical prime to be one of us. Besides, on the last room vote we all agreed to question him, not kill him straight away as you wanted. 3 to 1 is done is done. You’ll just have to put up with him for now. Try to use the time as an opportunity to know him better.”

“I’ve made my inquiries and seen enough of his ‘work’ to know he is and will always be nothing more than the type of gormless drone that latches onto the most galvanizing aspects of someone else’s personality and success while trying to emulate it himself. Isn’t that right?” Makhai leers at Dan and twirls another dart in his hand prompting Dan to reflexively twitch to the side in case he found himself under fire again. “You’re a bad mockup of all the things you wish you could be, because at the core you’re nothing- just an imprint of whatever traits impresses you the most in the moment, which makes you pathetic as well as impressionable and lazy. So let’s dispense with the false pleasantries of distinction and bring up the only adjectives which matter.”

His words leave a ringing imprint of an echo in the air after he finishes speaking and Dan says nothing in the face of it, instead adopting a careful, dispassionate stance. Nevertheless, a curl of indignation simmers along his jaw, clenching his teeth without him being conscious of it.

  _Don’t say a word_. _Not yet, this isn’t the time. If I slip up now, lose composure this early on, I’ll already have lost. Maybe it’s exactly what they want. And anyway, as far as adjectives go, it’s not the worst I’ve heard. They could take lessons from some of the people I went to school with. Or not to be honest..._

What did it matter to begin with if he found inspiration from others whose work ethics, philosophies or mannerisms he admired; why was it so wrong to use their example as a waypoint towards self-exploration and expression where he could eventually reach a plateau of change to become someone unique unto himself? What was originality at its most intrinsic level if not a collective of ideas and mindsets all communing with each other; borrowing and inciting creative impulses to make something new and different and original itself? He’d readily admit to having a list of people he looked up to and admired, not out of a desire to imitate them but to accommodate their perspectives, to understand and learn more about the world and himself, along the path to becoming more of who he envisioned his future self to be.

 _And as long as I remember who I am right now it’ll be fine_ , he thinks, and then silently adds, _maybe_.

He reaches for a better distraction to focus on, but it’s difficult to ignore the presence of so many eyes focused on him at one time in a way that’s somehow more intense than all the packed rooms in every convention he’s ever attended. There are small consolations to be found however, mainly in the warbles of atmospheric sounds all around him, in the popping sizzle of burning embers in the fireplace, the warm huffs of breath through Cavall’s mouth and the ping of rain against the bars of the windows on the other side of the room. He concentrates intently on isolating these, letting them ground him in the undemanding rhythm of normalcy. He’d never considered the science behind ASMR or if he might have a tinge of it himself, mildly brushing off the concept when Phil had brought it up as an idea for a video, but whether a natural response to hearing something pleasant or because the sounds are a better alternative to occupy his mind with instead of the instigating weight of Makhai’s words, he finds his jaw slowly relaxing and the calescent prickle of indignation lingering there begin to recede. Something of his discomfort must still translate however as Cavall readjusts his posture with a small wriggle of his paws to lean against Dan’s legs in a reassuring block of warmth.

Eris takes a long sip from the wine glass in her hand, her nails thoughtfully tapping the stem while peering at Dan, assessing him for a reaction, but when no reaction is forthcoming she finally looks away and sets the glass down.

“I had my doubts at first, but he shows promise,” she says. “Whatever his faults, Yilmaz recognized a potential in him. He clearly has ambition and you know his presence is nothing but beneficial for us.”

“ _Beneficial?_ ” Makhai’s feet drop heavily to the floor ad he gives the tabletop a sharp smack with his fist to punctuate his disbelief, hitting it so hard the decanter rocks in place, splashing drops of gore everywhere onto the rounded biceps of his arms and the back of Eris’s hand. “You keep using that word, but look at him. Look at what we’re meant to waste our time with -a baby faced pup with no brawn, no art and no mentionable talent or skill. You said the same yourself not a few hours ago before leaving here. There was a time when we consorted with the best and brightest and now we’ve apparently been reduced not only in number but in taste as well. What was the use of culling the ranks if this is what we’re meant to invite in? This isn’t a finishing school for unrefined whelps. So he has the blood of the eldest of us all and some amount of public renown. To what end? He’s still weak and undisciplined and therefore useless.”

Eris looks at her hand in distaste and rubs the drops of red away with her thumb; the remainder she delicately licks off on her mouth to blend in with her lipstick. “If he has no discipline, then you have even less patience. All the brute strength of the old Roman commander you used to be. You’d rather we recruited an army of soldiers. It’s always been nothing but blood and war with you. Like talking to a rabid bull.”

“And you like talking to a deceitful viper. You play both sides of the field just as well as the tactician I once was. Blood and war defines us both. You’ve always been the opportunist, going where the promise of conquest lies even if it means betraying us. You’d use him as a Trojan horse, install him here amongst us whilst secretly converting him to your needs, so you can return to the prefectures of your hometown with your prize and use him as a means to entice the Courts there to stand against us and destroy us, so you can reap the leftover spoils of power and influence for yourself. I told you, I know how you like to play.”

“Oh please, not this conversation again. I have distinct and diverse loyalties, true, but they don’t compete with those I have here.” She continues speaking over his derisive laugh at this statement. “Just because you turned traitor to your own doesn’t mean I’m the same. You see turncoats and deception in every shadow, but your guilt is your own problem, not mine, Makhai. Or should I say, Catiline?”

At the last word Makhai sobers instantly and the dart he holds bends into a perfect horseshoe shape in his clenched fist. “If you think saying my old name will get a rise from me, you’ll need to try harder than that. I’m not ashamed of my past.”

“No, just ashamed that even in death you’re the same failure you were in life.”

Makhai tosses aside the ruined dart and swiftly turns with the vicious speed of a lion jackknifing in midair to catch its prey, hands extended out as if he means to strangle Eris where she sits as she looks on with cool indifference. Dan has time to wonder if maybe the four archons are about to be reduced to three in front of his eyes before Aeacus surges up from his chair in a formidable towering presence, his shadow falling over the entirety of the table like a wide, black shroud, and bellows, “ _Enough!_ ”

Makhai freezes in place, every muscle straining with the effort to defy the command and bring his spat with Eris to a definitive crashing halt, but after meeting the challenge of Aeacus’s furious glower he presently slinks back with a low sardonic mutter of, ‘as you wish, _guv_ ,’ and takes his seat.

“He is here to stand trial amongst us, not to hear your petty grievances. We have a way of doing things and this is not it. Compose yourselves.”

Makhai mutters something else unintelligible and swipes up the decanter to pour himself a glass. Eris says nothing, but she presides over her own drink with a smugly content smile. Unconcerned with either of them, Lethe idly kicks her feet and looks on the entire scene as if it were a skit played out for her amusement- an encore of a performance which perhaps had been repeated many times before.

“You there.” Aeacus nods his grizzled head in George’s direction who immediately snaps to attention where he stands behind the table. “Bring our guest a chair, let him sit and let us begin.”

George steps to the task without hesitation and carries over one of the empty chairs at the table. He and Dan exchange the barest of glances in the process, a wordless, barely imperceptible but perfectly understood conversation of three seconds in which both of them communicate the dire and entirely ‘fucked’ nature of their circumstances, with George consigned to the role of reluctant witness to a proceeding which could go south at the slightest provocation and Dan consigned to that of accused criminal or, in Makhai’s view, the new blood irritant without much in the way of a social or professional résumé persuasive enough to plead his case for amnesty. At least when a stranger offered their cynical take on his career as being ‘sad’ or strange, he could move on from the encounter relatively unscathed, with the only casualty being a hit to his pride and self-esteem when the conversation replayed itself in his head for a month after. Here however the critiques border on life altering judgments and as he sits in the chair provided for him he suddenly understands how it must feel to be the suspect on the wrong side of every interrogation room, subject to the scrutiny of his entire life, every action and thought, without the benefit of a solicitor to act as a buffer against all the questions he’d rather not answer.

 _Not that I have to_ , he thinks. _They’ll try to make me, but I don’t have to explain myself and I don’t have to rise to their demands, no matter if Makhai tries to give me a Pinhead makeover with his darts. Which, in all honestly, looks like most likely outcome anyway._

“Would you like a glass too before we start?” Lethe holds up the decanter, showcasing the dark blood swirling inside and although the scent tugs at a flare of hunger that’s been teasing at his fangs ever since he’d left the locked blood soaked room behind earlier, Dan quickly shakes his head and swallows back the urge.

“No, thank you. I’m good.”

“Well, if you say so, but it’s very important to stay hydrated.” The blissfully unaware way in which she says it winds him momentarily with the outrageously inappropriate urge to laugh and he has to bite the soft lining of his cheeks to suppress the smirk fighting to cross his mouth.

“All new bloods tend to suffer from the thirst more than we do,” she goes on to say. “It’s quite fresh. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a taste?”

She fills an empty wineglass in front of her and passes it off to George. He places it on a round side table near Dan’s chair for him to take and drink at his leisure. It glints in the light like a large faceted ruby, filled with a substance more precious than any gem on earth and more satisfying than any sip of cold water or sweet Ribena he’s ever savored. The flare of hunger crests into a terrible compulsion to drink, sobering him instantly with a yearning twist of addictive need. It makes Dan want to ask for the whole pitcher full and forget the glass, but with his previous struggle with his own impulse control still looming large in mind, he steadies himself, studiously ignoring the glass of blood an arm’s length away and weakly replies, “no, no, really, I’m alright, but it’s nice of you to offer.”

“Oh, he called me nice. He’s very polite isn’t he?” Lethe stage whispers to Eris. “The last one told me to go to hell.”

“And then you sent them there yourself in a manner of speaking, didn’t you?”

“Yup.” Lethe appears very proud of this confirmation.

Aeacus ignores them and directs himself to Dan with a businesslike air. “Your name then, is Daniel Howell is it not?”

As Dan nods his head, Makhai gives a scoffing snort behind the rim of his glass. “ _Howell_. How far that exalted house of kings has fallen.”

“Oh, oh, I remember him,” Lethe says in earnest to which Makhai lowly mutters, “shocking.” If she hears the small barb she pays it no mind and continues on in the same excited fashion. “Only he was called King Hywel the Good back then, not Howell, wasn’t he? Things are spelled so differently now I can never keep up. But yes, he was such a nice man.”

“Ah yes, our incredible prognosticator of character hard at work again,” Makhai says. “With Yilmaz, all one needs to gain her interest is to be an unemployed entertainer; with Lethe all one needs is to wipe your ass, wash your hands and tell the Queen she’s a right lovely old bird.” Makhai ends his observation with an exaggeratedly posh accent.

“Well, _you’re_ not very nice.” Lethe crosses her arms matter-of-factly and Dan silently agrees.

Aeacus ignores this conversation too and proceeds with his interrogation. “You, Daniel Howell, are a new blood, sired by the one known as Yilmaz and on one evening hence you defied the law of blood rights, thereby depriving our steward, Ashton, of his mark. Is this also not so?”

“Yes,” Dan replies with only a second’s hesitation. “But there’s more to it than that. For one, I didn’t know anything about blood rights or stewards until a few hours ago. Yilmaz wasn’t enlightening about the experience after she er- ‘sired me’. ”

“It is true that Yilmaz’s habits are more isolating and unforgiving in practice. She prefers to gauge the strength and worthiness of her subjects by how well they can fend for themselves without instruction. Still- ignorance of a law does not exculpate you of breaking it.” The frothy brows knit together and Aeacus’ chin lifts higher. “You were warned besides. Ashton himself gave testimony of how he explained the consequences of your actions to you, but that you persisted regardless, attacking him in public and threatening him with exposure. This was no innocent crime. You stole his mark and assaulted him. Is that not so?”

“No. No, it’s not so.”

Aeacus draws himself up into a portrait of severe authority and the smell which rides the air is only one Dan can describe as ‘sickly.’ It cleaves the atmosphere of the room with a suffocating aura like dread, similar to how he felt traversing long foreboding hallways at night or to seeing the shape of dark trees twisting towards the sky like a fractured crack in a tile on the kitchen floor. The smell seems to pour out of every wall as if there was a pulsing infestation of mold festering behind the white plaster and ornate wooden arabesques, a toxic fungal growth as pale and overwhelming as the room itself. At Dan’s feet, Cavall picks up on it as well and whines, ears pressed flat against his skull.

“Are you perhaps calling Ashton a liar? Are you accusing him of petitioning our intercession for a trivial parlor game of his own invention or is that you question my judgment?”

 _Because if it’s either, we can settle this matter right here and now without further discussion,_ the tone implies. Makhai looks only too pleased with the idea.

“What I mean is, I didn’t just decide to pick a fight with him,” Dan rushes to clarify. “I was defending myself; I was defending my friend.”

“Ah, yes. Eris spoke to me briefly of this human, the one named Phil.” Aeacus grants him a dark considering look. “You call him friend, but Ashton said he possessed no mark for you to claim him as your own. We are not creatures disposed to distinguishing friend from foe on sight. Prey is prey. Human allegiances are blurred in the face of hunger. We barter in blood alone. Without a mark, friend or not, he was still Ashton’s by rights of first claim.”

“Phil isn’t a can of beans on the shelf at Tesco’s. No one ‘claims’ him. He’s his own person.”

Eris laughs and the sound of it is high and mocking. “No one claims him yet you’ve apparently done so anyway,” she says. “You intervened to protect him, to defend him with your life and bring him back to a home you both share, all to reinstate his presence at your side. You don’t claim him but it’s obvious you regard him in a light of distinction exclusive and special to you alone, one you wouldn’t share with anyone else. He’s more than just a blood claim, more than just a…’friend,’ is _that_ not so?”

“Yes, tell us then,” Aeacus rejoins. “What loyalties do you possess with this human to make you so willfully reckless despite, as you say, having no clue of your nature or purpose? What exactly is this human, this Phil, to you that he commands your respect and consideration without question?”

 Dan falls quiet, unsure of what to say; unsure he has the inclination to say anything at all. It’s the same dilemma he’d faced in the car ride over as he’d stewed in the mounting frustration of wondering why Eris deserved an answer to something so personal. Why did any of the rest of them for that matter?

Aeacus’ chin lifts higher in expectation of a reply and the longer Dan remains silent the more that ‘sickly’ smell mills in a noxious vapor around the room, threatening him to speak, to answer the question before he was made to answer it.

_But what am I supposed to say? Phil is my- my what? Friend? Acquaintance? Lover? Kindred spirit? Associated act? Partner in crime? All of the above? Something more than all of the above? Why do I even have to explain it? He’s just Phil Lester, a force unto himself, a complementary presence I can’t define and wouldn’t try to. He’s with me. I’m with him. How am I supposed to put a name to that? Why should I even try? For whose benefit-theirs? Just to give them the satisfaction of an answer I don’t feel much obliged to give?_

The scent peaks, rising off Makhai as well as Aeacus this time and it hooks around his chest and along his jaw in a static charge of nervous energy like the tingling electric buzz preceding a lightning strike. He doesn’t want to be here, sitting in this whitewashed room full of too much light and too many eyes, everyone watching him carefully with the clinical indifference of surgeons gathered to observe a procedure, measuring every twitch of muscle and flicker of his eyes, interpreting every movement and word for a hint of all the things he doesn’t say to make a composite sketch of his intentions to fit their own impressions of who he was. He doesn’t want to subject Phil to the same, to make a throwaway comment that would pass through the filter of their judgments reducing Phil to that of simply just, ‘the friend,’ or to simply that of, ‘the human named Phil’ when of course he encompassed more worlds of definition and meaning than could be expressed, just like every other person on the planet. Everything he could say feels too reductive to do Phil any justice; every explanation no matter how eloquently conceived in his mind seems too important and personal to waste on the instigating audience seated at the table.

 The electric sensation amps up another degree and the asphyxiating block of air from before coalesces again in the middle of his throat. Breathing was no longer a necessary function of his newly transformed biology, but the choking, strangled feeling closing tighter around his neck still feels uncomfortable. He shuts his eyes and tries to ground himself in the atmospheric sounds of the fireplace and the rain again, to mentally project himself anywhere that wasn’t in the stiffly painful backrest of the chair he was sitting in, but he can’t shake the expectant weight of the Court’s eyes staring at him. The room becomes an insisting plane of existence he can’t dismiss, as if the house were a manner of creature itself, an extension of the Court, something undead and hungering, waiting to claim him as its own version of a blood right, eager to lock him up and store him away amongst a dozen rooms similar to this one, to add him to its magpie hoard of worthless treasures or to slowly devour him one question and accusation at a time. He can’t dismiss the room around him, but he tries anyway, hoping by some virtue of impromptu meditation like a headlong rush of a seven second challenge he might be able to shut out reality long enough to condense the erratic pulse of all his competing thoughts down to something concise and convincing enough to say. He’s concentrating so deeply on this, teeth grit and shoulders tense, he nearly jumps out of his seat, straight up into the air when Cavall leans forward to seize his fingers again in a gentle lock of teeth.

 His eyes snap open and he stares down at the little white dog who looks back with the same soulful, bright eyed gaze, expecting nothing, asking for nothing –merely intuiting Dan’s need for calm and offering it via a warm, vaguely slobbery, makeshift take on a hand hold.  Each small panting breath falls on the back of his palm, tickling along his skin and this more than the crackling drift of the fireplace or the rain falling against the windows helps ease him away from the convoluted pressure of his thoughts.

“What does it matter?” He lifts his head slowly to meet the Court’s stares head on. “There’s always more than one answer to a question and what you see you just don’t question. We’re friends, we give a damn about each other, we work well together, we share life together and we enjoy life together. What more do you really need to know?”

“Everything,” Aeacus replies at once.

“Everything,” Lethe repeats and her face is no longer beguilingly innocent, but intense with a feverish light of hunger he knows has nothing to do with blood. Next to her, Eris and Makhai remain silent but their unblinking stares insinuate the same demand. ‘ _Everything_ ,’ their eyes say, ‘ _we demand everything you are, everything you have to give._ ’

“What if I don’t want to tell you,” Dan says. “What if I say you just need to accept that you don’t really have to know everything and why?”

“That’s so dull.” Lethe pouts and slumps back in her chair. “It’s never half as good without all the details.”

“You’re here at our discretion and you remain alive at our discretion,” Eris replies. “It’d be nice of you to start showing a bit of gratitude and just do this the easy way. We can get what we need with a bit of delving and coercion. We’re not new to the game, but why should we have to go through all the trouble? Besides, we’ve been through this same dance of tired rhetoric before in the car. You’re a public figure. You should be used to this line of questioning by now. It’s not as if we’re asking for NSA secrets. Just give us what we ask of you.”

Her dark stare finishes the rest of the sentence, silently communicating to him, ‘give us everything, whether we ask it of you or not, whether you want to or not.’

“No,” he says.

Eris shakes her head and smiles, as if she were pleased by his defiance despite herself. “I’m afraid you don’t have a say in the matter.”

“I always have a say and I say no.”

George looks quietly astounded at this response. His eyes dart back and forth between Dan and the Night Court as if watching a furious round of tennis in which he couldn’t be sure which lob of a reply would be parried with another rejoinder or answered with a sudden violent attack to end the match altogether.

“I have a say too.” Makhai sneers. “And I say if he doesn’t want to participate in the conversation then we end it here and destroy him. We should at least get some entertainment out of this and as he’s conveniently chosen to be an entertainer allow him to fulfill his life purpose with the only performance worth watching.”

Aeacus holds up his hand to stop Makhai’s simmering ire from boiling over. “Be still. Things have not risen to that level of conflict yet.”

The way he says it makes Dan uneasy, as if the possibility of that level of conflict were closer to becoming reality with every minute that passed and only by the grace of their sustained interest in talking with him was he still alive.

 _It’s not just a possibility, that’s exactly what’s going on here_ , Dan thinks. _Like a version of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except it’s, ‘keep talking and I don’t end up head first in that fireplace.’ Although, becoming a flaky pile of ash sounds like an improvement over sitting here and being forced to listen to questions I’m never going to answer. At least not like this and definitely not to them._

Next to him, Cavall’s tail wags enthusiastically as if in silent encouragement of all the thoughts running through Dan’s head and despite the not so pleasant circumstances of his dilemma he finds himself unable to help smiling.

_You don’t have a clue where you are or who I am or what’s going on, do you? You’d probably rather be eating your way through a bag of crisps right now- which honestly? Same. Not that I could anymore if I wanted to, but thanks for being a good doggo and giving me the illusion of support anyway._

Cavall tilts his head and scratches behind one furry pert ear, completely oblivious.

“It’s just an act,” Makhai says. “There’s nothing more to it, otherwise he wouldn’t be so coy about answering us. You’re putting on a show to bank off the mystery and intrigue behind it all and telling us would ruin the illusion, just as Ashton killing your friend that night would have brought the performance to a crashing halt. You’re a professional con artist, working the game of empathy to your advantage, playing off of what others expect to see, to give them a narrative that fits their sappy expectations for something to believe in. Go on then, confess. It wouldn’t endear me to you, but I’d at least allow myself to be impressed by the shrewd scheme of it all. So I suppose the real question now is- do you truly love him or is the idea just good for business?”

His fangs throb in his mouth and Dan clenches his teeth before speaking to keep his voice level and calm. “I think it’s my own business and not any of yours. You can cook up as many theories about me as you like. I won’t judge. I do love a good conspiracy theory. But could you make me a secret elf prince in hiding in one of them? It’d make my life sound way more interesting.”

Makhai stills. “Are you mocking me?”

“I guess you’ll believe whatever you’d like to believe no matter what I say, so it’s really up to you.”

“Perhaps you don’t understand your position here. Perhaps you need to be reminded of the severity of your actions.” Aeacus’ voice interrupts the tense standoff before Makhai can say another word or try piercing Dan’s nose this time with another flung dart. “You are a powerful new blood, with stores of strength at your disposal, strength which you used recklessly against one of our own, all for the sake of one human, merely on the pretense of your feelings for him. It is a poor excuse for your actions and a disgraceful abuse of your powers. It is also evidence of a weakness that has brought you here to stand accused rather than welcomed. And so, we ask you to explain the extent of your loyalties for this ‘friend,’ to see how deeply your flaw of sentimentality runs and to see if it has any remedy of reason left to appeal to.”

“What do you mean ’remedy of reason to appeal to?’” Dan frowns. “It’s not a flaw to care about someone important to me.”

“Caring? Do you mean affection? Worse, do you mean perhaps love?” Aeacus’s face segues into an expression Dan could mistake for genuine concern, but the sifting odor of boiling pitch in the room alerts him that it’s stems more from derision. “I see now, how unfortunate. You think you love this creature. You think he loves you.”

Dan says nothing, unwilling to explain, although Aeacus pauses again to allow him to defend himself, but he knows any reply would amount to a confession they would only use as evidence against him the same way Eris weaved everything he said and didn’t say into a narrative to suit her isolated point of view. As expected, his silence only makes Aeacus nod his weathered head like a parent faced with the heavy task of illuminating their child to the darker realities of the world.

 “I am not unsympathetic to your dilemma. Only a few days ago you were merely human after all and it is difficult to leave that life behind when it continues to persist as a strong memory of an illusion you cling to as your only point of relevance to the world. But you must understand- you no longer see the world with human eyes. You no longer require the same fallacies of reason humans worship endlessly in order to give meaning to their fleeting lives. They cling to the idea of God like they cling to the idea of love because it presents a convenient fiction to help them cope with the inescapable truths of their quick and uncertain demise. Thinking themselves powerless and lacking, they worship things which don’t exist, like children in inflatable rafts to stay afloat in deep water, too afraid to let go and realize they can survive without them. They need their crutches of meaning- their religions and love stories, their quibbles of principles and ethics- because they are too afraid to face the world on their own terms. Parables exist to make children fear the wolf in themselves and in others, they are never taught how to confront the wolf or how to be the wolf. They are taught to kill the thing which would give them power. The moral at the end of these stories is never one of goodness. It is about limitations and cowardice. Love then exists to teach humans to fear the prospect of facing life alone, to make them believe they cannot survive without the care and attention of someone else at their side and the moral of the lesson is never compassion, it is one of limitations and cowardice as well. Humans hinder themselves in endless ways, but you, child, are no longer human. You are more than they will ever be. You do not need to spite your abilities. Tigers do not know ‘love.’ Grizzlies do not know ‘caring.’ ”

“Good thing I’m not either,” Dan says dryly.

 _Despite how many people think I’m secretly a furry_ , he thinks at the same time.

“Do you believe you’re still human?” Aeacus shakes his head in the same derisive, pitying manner. “Do you believe any of the old definitions of your former life still apply?”

“Life has always been this fluctuating state of change where I’m constantly learning more about myself and adapting as I go along, whether you’re talking about my ‘former life’ or this one.  So, I’ve never really applied any one definition in the first place.”

Makhai laughs. “No big surprise there. How can you? When you’ve never had a clue who or what you are to begin with, when you’re only a poor double shadow of all the people you admire? It’s true what I said, you’re a leech, draining everyone around you of all the most convincing things they have to say and parroting it without understanding half of what you hear, without expending any real effort towards debating or studying it yourself. Behold- one more armchair scholar of the world, speaking without the context of knowledge or experience, content to lounge in the safety of their own heads debating love and politics and the misery of the human condition without lifting a finger to put action behind their words. How can you be anything when you leap from interest to interest, opinion to opinion and philosophy to philosophy, like a flea jumping from one mutt to the next? No wonder you succumbed so easily to something as idiotic as love.”

He turns his face away in disgust. “We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one. We might as well sire the dog and be done with it.”

Cavall’s ears twitch back against his skull again as if he’d understood perfectly and wasn’t at all on board with the idea.

“He is confused,” Aeacus says. “We all were new bloods once trying to shirk off the dirt of our old lives. We all went through the same uneasy evolution to be greater.”

Makhai leans forward and jabs his finger towards Aeacus in accusation. “No, old man. We were never just new bloods, get it right. _We_ were great. _We_ were chosen. _He_ was an accident. His ‘struggles’ are not ours.”

“Perhaps so, but in the matter of Ashton’s assault, thus far I’ve heard only evidence of a mind corrupted by fantasy and irrationality. This is not a case of willing rebellion or insubordination. In fact, he’s shown remarkable restraint for a new blood surviving on his own merit without succumbing to madness and mindless violence.” Aeacus looks at Dan thoughtfully. “Perhaps greatness is a quality he may yet earn.”

“I’m not looking to earn anything. At least not the qualities you mean,” Dan says quietly. “And there’s nothing irrational about having empathy for other people.”

“Is it not? Consider a world of people obsessed with finding love before they’re deemed unfit by society’s arbitrary timetable to receive it; a world of people postponing successful careers and schooling to be with the ones they claim to love instead; people pretending to be all the best qualities they think the one they love will admire most at the cost of their own individuality; people killing for love, cheating for love and dying for love. It is an excuse for the worst acts of humanity. Love is the execratory residue of weakness and loneliness, nothing more. In time, with your absence, this Phil whom you swear by so loyally will forget you and fixate on better, brighter people in your stead. He would regret your absence briefly, but inevitably, his weakness would compel him to move on. In his absence, as a human, you would do the same. How can you then justify love, in concept or practice, as anything worthy of wasting time over?”

“People deserve to be happy. That’s justification enough. If I wasn’t around I wouldn’t expect Phil to force himself to be alone for the rest of his life. And if it were me in his place…” Dan trails off, his thoughts a muddled dark pool in his head.

 He thinks of facing the prospect of eternity without Phil. He thinks of nearly losing him to Ashton, thinks of nearly killing Phil himself. Thinks of the enormous rift Phil’s absence would leave in its wake, a huge blot like a thunderstorm twenty times the size of the one raging outside.

_If it were me….if he was gone, what would I do? How do you mend a hurt that big?_

 The muddled dark pool in his head festers, churning wildly towards overload and he quickly shakes his head to clear the feeling away.

“Look, I don’t know exactly how to define love. I know what it could be at its best, I know what it feels like to be loved, truly loved, in that way when someone cares for you implicitly without question, when you’re comfortable in someone else’s presence, when love is just another word for loyalty and trust and compassion and the kind of intimacy not strictly built on sex.”

 _Or, more simply, when love is just another word for Phil_ , he adds in his head.

Aloud he says, “Living things try to connect with one another, not always out of some biological imperative. Even animals exhibit compassion towards each other in different ways.” He glances back at Cavall eyeing him with a contentedly happy and focused stare. “We try to reach out for one another- for support, for understanding- because we feel lonely or weak and we need to know there’s someone looking out for us, someone we know we can find refuge in, someone we know who will always believe in us especially during those times when we don’t, someone who will wait for us, who will genuinely want to help and guide us without let or obligation; someone who will freely accept the same back from us- and there’s nothing wrong with that. We call it love because it’s the best way to describe a feeling with no physical equivalent, except for displays of affection to try to bridge the gap between all the things we can’t say. And alright, sure, people don’t always have the best intentions and sometimes people fuck it up. We get it wrong, but it doesn’t mean the concept of love itself is to blame. It’s not a weakness to be with someone or to care about someone. It’s actually kind of brave to let up your guard and allow yourself to be vulnerable in someone’s presence because you know you can trust them; because they know they can trust you. However else you want to call it, love is incredibly powerful. It’s an asset, not a liability.”

Out of all the eyes trained on him from behind the table, only George looks quietly thoughtful and captivated by his words. The rest look on in varying portraits of amusement, boredom, outrage and from Lethe, an inattentive dreaminess. If anything they look like scavengers, Dan realizes for the first time, distant echoes of the animal headed revelers in the mural above their heads, each assessing him for weaknesses to ply for their advantage and entertainment. As Makhai stares at him, Dan has a moment of reflection in which the contemptuous smirk on his face resembles a hyena’s lolling maw. He almost expects to hear the jittering bark of a laugh spill from Makhai’s mouth the next time he speaks. In quick succession, the rest of the Court begin to resemble a menagerie of strange hybridized creatures in his imagination. From left to right sit grotesque parodies of slinking carrion eaters, like the skeksis from the Dark Crystal, he thinks, all of them united in a confederacy of greed and sevidical potshots; all of them animalistic, bellicose beings who, unlike Cavall, the only true animal in the room, had no interest in gestures of affection, much less his own sentimentalized explanations. The only wisdom between them derived itself from the oldest laws of nature, primeval codes of survival rooted in savagery and opportunistic attack. For such creatures the wellbeing of others did not count as matters of highest priority, much less discussions on the concept of love. He’s aware he’s only wasting time in presenting his opinion. They’re too old, too rooted in their ways to capitulate to objectivity or to see beyond their narrow perspectives to consider him as a person instead of a side show anomaly to be prodded and teased, but as long as he was afforded the chance to speak, even tied up and trapped with nowhere to go, he decides to speak his piece in the off chance that maybe his previous idea of catching them off guard might still work to his advantage. The plan however doesn’t appear promising as Aeacus regards him in the same unimpressed, reprimanding light of a headmaster forced to contend with an unruly student who’d been called to his office for the twentieth time in two weeks.

“You make a moving argument,” he says finally. “The kind of talk we once considered turning Shakespeare for, to have him as our personal court jester to write ballads and plays about human emotion for us to laugh at. But your emotional bias does not make your opinion true. It only makes you highly gullible and easily influenced, as Makhai has already said. You have conditioned yourself towards an understanding of what you believe ‘love’ means and constrained its definition to encompass one person. How inane, to sacrifice your company and the entirety of your potential to this boy who is merely one more human in a sea of humanity. That isn’t love. It’s a compromise. A foul one. How many lovers could you have in a single night, a week, a year? How many of them could you take, in body and blood and feel the same heated stroke of passion? Love is an illusory theory humans weave and dissolve as easily as an invented lie. At its core, that’s all it is. Many psychoanalysts, merely humans themselves, know this to be true.”

“And are you saying that because you know their position is irrefutable or are you just ‘parroting something you heard?’ Because it sounds like a subjective bias to me either way,” Dan says, unimpressed. “I may not be a _summa cum laude_ graduate or a crusty fossil of a vampire, but I think I have enough context of experience in this subject to confidently say love is more than just a ‘foul compromise.’”

It’s a quick bite of a reply that rolls right off his tongue, a small act of defiance he knows is probably about as effective as tossing a paper ball at a rhino, but George immediately looks nervous at how the perceived audacity of his answer might come across. However, the Court’s impassive faces don’t change, except for Makhai who toys with another dart across his knuckles while glowering at Dan with the same reek of ‘sickly dread’ spilling off him in waves like bad cologne.

“So quick with that mouth, Daniel. You get too far ahead of yourself to pause and consider the facts.” Eris nonchalantly swirls the glass in her hand, making a dark whirlpool of the blood inside. “Strip away your quaint analyses and love is just the result of endocrinological secretions, abandonment issues and societal norms. Humans are conditioned to attach their lives to another stranger in the false hope they’ll find meaning and support if they do. Towards that end, you’re right, love is incredibly powerful, the same way any act of widespread tyranny is powerful, the way throughout history there have been humans who loved their cruel gods and ruthless dictators who themselves never carried an ounce of love as part of their philosophies. It’s just one more base human idea. You’re more than that now. It wouldn’t hurt for you to start acting like it.”

It’s like a rehashed version of the ubiquitous refrain of, ‘act your age’ he’d heard time and again despite never having understood what exactly that was supposed to mean. When people had told him at seventeen to act his age how did that differ from twenty six? How would it differ when he was thirty? Or sixty? If age was just a number and youth a frame of mind, then who could ever be said to truly be acting their age? He wonders then what Eris means when she says for him to start acting like a vampire and less of a human. If the jury was still out on what exactly defined the human experience, if even plants embodied a form of sentience and biological functions on par with a human, if even animals like Cavall knew what it was to empathize without expecting anything in return, if the definition of humanity itself was, as some philosophers believed, merely a state of existence in which individuals were imposed upon by their environments, forcing them to react and conform so that individuality was just a reflection of societal expectations thereby diminishing the idea of self-agency altogether, then- then, what exactly did it mean to be human? What did it mean to reject that experience to be something else, to be something not human at all? How did emotions distinguish humans from vampires, how did the absence of emotions- the absence of love- make the case for a vampire as more intellectually superior than a human? Maybe it didn’t matter at all, maybe the entirety of existence was, as some other philosophers and scientists believed, a projection of reality in which nothing existed save as a simulation in which all thoughts, triumphs and ordeals were programmed bits of code acting out endless processes of eventualities until God or his equivalent opened a celestial task manager and hit end.

He shakes his head again and at his feet, Cavall whines with a subtle but definite inflection Dan recognizes as a tone meant to indicate a question, as if Cavall were asking him what was wrong.

 _Nothing at all_ , Dan thinks. N _othing except all of it. Nothing except too many questions and too little answers and no way out of this room or my own head_.

He’s never missed Phil more than in this exact moment. He’d have stopped Dan’s train of thought in its tracks before it derailed its way from idle conjecture to fatalistic meditation. Matters of identity and authenticity seemed of little concern to Phil who was satisfied to continue pursuing happier, lighter pursuits and recording videos towards that same end without weighing himself down with existential ideas about his relevance or his age although Dan knew he thought about these things too in his own quiet way, prodding at them from the safe distance of humor or preferring to ignore it altogether and carry on with life as he saw fit. Phil seemed to regard the world by degrees of variation where people regularly demonstrated themselves to be at times boring and predictable, or conversely, at their worst, prone to acts of unspeakable terror, sadness and corruption, but he was more often moved by their greater capacity to be inspiring motivators of positive change, possessed of personalities which were refreshingly different and surprising in their chosen expressions of humor and creativity. It was this redemptive vision of humanity Phil had decided to adopt as his overriding philosophy for how he perceived the world around him without fixating on somber, gloomier subjects beyond his control, granting them only a cursory glance of respect and acknowledgement before quickly moving on. Dan suspected on another level of his being, carefully hidden away, Phil was bothered more deeply about certain subjects than he otherwise allowed other people to see, even Dan himself, but talking about the complexity of social ills or how he truly felt when he was anything other than content was always secondary to wondering if bees could dream or if ants were capable of waging a global takeover.

For Phil, love wasn’t a philosophical quandary. He embraced the concept as something undefinable but inherently kind; something complex but innately comforting, and above all Phil gave precedence to people, interests and situations which engendered that exact feeling of comfort and kindness. If Phil were here now, sat in front of the Court for questioning instead, Dan is sure he wouldn’t have been plagued with the same internal struggle. He’d have stuck to his convictions, unwilling to consider the possibility that something so hopeful and benign could be a universal sham or that what he and Dan shared, a level of connection on par with ionic bonds breakable only by forces of nature greater than either one of them combined, could also be considered a sham.

“ _So what if they think you’re ridiculous for believing in love?_ ” Dan hears the mental projection of Phil’s voice speak up in his head again like a soft disembodied murmur. “ _Everything is ridiculous to someone else. I steal your cereal even though I can buy plenty of my own, you stay up at 3am practicing bomb missions in Mario Kart and we both made careers out of recording videos of ourselves for YouTube. To other people it’s probably more than a bit ridiculous, maybe to us too sometimes, but it’s what we do, it’s who we are, it’s the way we chose to define our lives. And at the end of all of it, we’re happy. We’re okay.  What else matters_?”

Dan wants to say many, many other things mattered- how it wasn’t just looking ridiculous to everyone else it was how ridiculous to the point of meaningless his life sometimes felt to himself; how all the implications of his actions he thought about in the middle of the night made self-objectivity more of a struggle than it should be; how things could be misconstrued and taken out of proportion to cause more trouble than he intended, how he wasn’t always happy with his past decisions or past self, how life was a trajectory of conflicting traumas and inexplicable acts of misery he couldn’t always reconcile to Phil’s hopeful vision of the world, how regret and doubt could overshadow his successes in more ways than he wanted it to, how being okay- being happy- were transitory states of feeling he couldn’t always define or hold onto. But in the end he finds it simpler to agree. As Phil himself might have contended, sometimes the simplest explanations were the best ones. Dan thinks the best proof of that lay in the years they’d spent sharing the same house and the same career. If he made a compendium detailing the full extent of their years together, from Manchester to London, from YouTube to Radio, to whatever projects and pursuits waited to be conceived in the future, the end result would be page after page testifying to moments full of the kind of comfort, love, humor and freedom he and Phil valued, moments filled with love in all its variations and gestures; moments of ridiculous, genuine happiness which held more importance than the Court and all their questions or judgments ever would.

No, it didn’t matter at all. None of them did. At least when he indulged in self-scrutiny, it was to arrive at a better understanding of himself and all the myriad paths his mind liked to take, especially when it meandered down darker paths of thought he struggled to subdue. The Court’s method of inquiry seems more aligned to mock him and convert him to their vision of who they thought he should be- something cold and vicious like them. It reminds him of what George had said about being in secondary when all the bullied kids learned how to be the bullies, until the ones getting their heads flushed started pulling the levers themselves. It reminds him of his own uncomfortable experiences with the daily survival quest which had been his school, surrounded by crowds of boys all trying to save face in front of one another with their complicated territorial dances of dominance and aggression borne from nervous uncertainty about themselves and each other, all struggling not be the one ousted from their fragile cliques comprised of the physically accomplished and the effortlessly cool. Dan’s inability to fit in amongst them or to care enough to play along singled him out as belonging to the few undesirable nonconformists who were dealt with by being persuaded to fall in line via a well-timed ball to the face and a jeering string of invectives for good measure. Further defiance risked the reward of more pointed physical and verbal threats, along with gaining the standing reputation as ‘the weirdo,’ ‘the gaylord,’ or the ‘posh kid with the extended vocabulary, penchant for smiling and aversion to all things sports, who thought he was better than anyone else.’

 _But even they had an excuse_ , Dan thinks. _They were only human. Only kids._ _Most of them were probably just dealing with family and personal issues and taking it out on everyone else was the best option over coping with it on their own when they didn’t even know where to begin. I had my moments too back then. Maybe it’s not the best excuse, but it’s a better one than being a powerful, centuries old vampire and bullying others just because they can or trying to convert me to their way of thinking because they’ve decided it’s superior._

It was as if the Court had long since forgotten what it had been like to be human with all its pitfalls and weaknesses or perhaps it was that, even as human, none of those seated at the table had ever grown out of their adolescent bullies phase, embracing it as a way of life instead of realizing it for the poor coping mechanism it was. If these were the people and tactics Eris meant for him to embrace then he thinks he’d gladly resign himself to adopting whatever insulting nicknames they might christen him with next as a result.

“I don’t have to pause and consider any facts. Not when it comes to this,” he says and looks Eris squarely in the eye. “If love really is a base human idea- empathy, kindness, affection and all the rest of it- then I guess we’ll just have to cope with my decision to have a different standard of living than yours.”

 _A better one_ , he adds silently.

“What a waste.” Makhai shakes his head. “So you’d neuter your potential for the sake of your little security blanket of a human to make you feel better about yourself because you’re too scared to confront your shortcomings alone. You think your nature knows anything about love? When you hunger, tell me if you’d look at this Phil with the eyes of human compassion or the eyes of the predator you are.”

Dan falls quiet, too intimidated by the unbidden memory of his fangs biting deep into Phil’s arm and the flooding taste of intoxicating warmth and overwhelming want which had come with it.

“You already know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You’re a creature of vicious desires now, boy. It’s time for you to wake up to reality and stop pretending you’re something less. Not that it’s important to me what you decide to do. Lost causes aren’t worth my time or effort to correct. For that matter, it shouldn’t be worth _any_ of our time or effort.” Makhai glares over at Aeacus as he says this.

“You said it yourself, it’d be a waste for him to throw his potential away and it would be a waste for us to dispose of it too,” Eris says. “Consider this, a new blood with the courage and temerity to challenge us, who had the same strength of character to take on Ashton and survive, who didn’t lose himself to a blood frenzy on his first night dealing with the hunger on his own, who has all the qualities necessary to sit amongst us-” Makhai interrupts with another graveled noise of disgust from low in his throat but Eris ignores him with a tight roll her eyes and carries on. “It’s an impressive feat not most in his position could accomplish. All he needs is a bit of instruction and incentive to see things our way, to improve his life and make him fit to reside with us in eternity.”

As he listens to Eris’ proposal, a hot wave of indignation obliterates every uncomfortable memory from Dan’s mind and his back goes rigid with defensive tension. “Thanks, but I don’t actually need unsolicited opinions about how I’m supposed to categorize and live my life, more specifically I don’t need it from you.”

“Really now. What a self-righteous position of a double standard coming from someone who deals with the worst of public opinion in every comment train appearing below your videos. Unsolicited opinions are the bread and butter of society. Strangers will always have something to say about who you are and why you lack the character, depth and success they expect to see even when you don’t care to know their thoughts on the matter. Humans would find themselves at a loss if they were able to mind their own business, perhaps it’s the same with us as well, but unlike the human herd our comments are weighed with the authority of centuries worth of hard won experience. We have the right to offer you guidance where you lack direction. We’ve spent eons gathering power and wisdom, honing our perspective into a more perfected vision of the world than a human will ever have. ”

“It’s my life,” he says slowly. “And as long as it’s my life, as long as I’m the one living it, my perspective is the only one that counts.”

 “Ah, but do you even know what your perspective is?” Aeacus asks. “Can you answer that honestly when by your own admission you can’t even claim an identity?” He steeples his fingers and peers over their peak, looking down his nose with all the commanding gravity of Christopher Lee.

 _Or Christopher Lee as Saruman_ , Dan thinks. _The scarier, nightmare version he might have turned into if Sauron had actually won._

Oblivious to the Tolkien comparisons running through Dan’s head, Aeacus goes on.  
“Can you tell me what conflation of concepts describes who you are at this moment? Can you really say with any certainty which part of you hasn’t been adopted from the roles others expect you to play? What part of you is genuine, what part is deliberately affected artifice or what part is merely a tired fabrication you can no longer shake off? Dear child, you hardly know what and who you are. You grandstand and deflect to the contrary, giving importance to your experiences and perspectives and intellectual pursuits you scarcely comprehend, but you know it’s true. Even if you change your name and appearance, as long as you cling to tired concepts and to people who serve no purpose other than to slow your progress, you will always be nothing but a carbon copy of someone else’s identity, just as all humans in turn are nothing more than the accumulated dross of someone else’s tawdry imitations of all the things they wish they could be. You seek authenticity? To embody truth and skill? Then take this opportunity to shed your old self and make something more of the gifts you’ve been given. The greatest human minds of the ages spanning philosophers, alchemists, scientists and mystics-all the greatest secret societies of Rosicrucians, Templars and Masons- all ventured forth with their abilities to explore that one great frontier of knowing the Self, yet after centuries of study and speculation, none of them can attribute any great universal truth to the matter. But they were only human and what we are is a step closer to what they could never achieve. You offend your own potential by denying what you are now; by turning your nose up at us. We know better because we have lived better, we have survived better. In short, we _are_ better. It’s a pretty notion for the youth of any age to defy their elders, but in this case as in most, you do so at your own peril. We are your perfected reflection. See us and see what you could be.”

Aeacus ends this grandiose statement with an elegant flourish of his hand to indicate those gathered at the table alongside him. As his hand passes up and through the air, Lethe startles from her errant daydream and abruptly raises her hand too. Makhai stares at her for a long moment in deadpanned silence as she freezes in place like a student overly eager to be called on in class.

“Lethe…what are you doing?”

“We’re taking a room vote, yes?” Lethe gestures at Aeacus’ upraised hand. “I vote in favor. Or I would except- I don’t remember what we’re voting for.”

“We’re deciding whether Hollywood should stop producing Terminator sequels,” Eris says in the dry offhand tone of someone who’s had enough.

“Oh! Oh yes, definitely. I feel very strongly about this.” Lethe nods her head gravely. “You see one and you think it’s alright, but afterwards there’s always more and more and they just get progressively worse over time and they leave holes _everywhere_. It’s very bad you know, especially for an old house like this one. If they’re not stopped in time the entire foundation could collapse.”

Puzzled silence falls over the room. An extremely world weary look crosses Aeacus’ face, going from that of reproving headmaster to one who couldn’t wait to retire. No one moves to speak until suddenly, Makhai finally manages to put the pieces together. He covers his face with one hand and lets out a long winded sigh.

“Termites,” he says. “You’re thinking of termites.”

“Well, yes, of course. Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” Lethe peers around in wide-eyed confusion. “I keep telling everyone it’s a problem and no one ever listens to me.”

“Our perfected reflection,” Makhai mutters, tilting back his glass and draining it in one long drowning swig. “Yes, see what you could become if your fool’s luck runs out. Maybe we should have recruited the bard after all. Flowery language or not, he at least made more sense by comparison.”

Aeacus wearily shakes his head. “Lethe’s distractions aside, or better, using it to illustrate my earlier point, individuals are given to hear what they want to hear and to believe what they want to believe, regardless of logic. Love is no different. It’s an abstract delusion the mind must heal itself of in order to succeed. We did not endure boundless centuries being soft hearted towards our enemies and we do not harbor friends as the notion of friendship itself does not exist.”

 _You’re not supposed to exist_ , Dan thinks, but he supposes belaboring the point would be useless.

“Compassion, love, and friendship- all of it is irrelevant. Machinations of a human mind bred on self-indulgent flagellation and fairytale illusions they should have left behind in childhood. A world choking itself on platitudes of love, bending over backwards to congratulate themselves for caring about people other than themselves, yet atrocities continue to propagate unchecked ad infinitum. Do you really believe caring about one campaign, one human or one cause will stop the flow of blood in every country where war is a familiar landmark dotting every person’s backyard with gunfire and missile blasts? Do you think wasting time caring for another’s wellbeing will grant you any satisfaction or peace of mind in the face of every doubt and fear you hide in your heart? No, Daniel. People die in the crossfire of conflicts greater than they are every day and not all the good feelings or charities in the world will ever stop it. Neither will it help you. The only virtues worth expounding are those belonging to dispassionate ideals of strength, force, and cunning. These are the true elements of life, the only constants of action which have ensured the survival and victory of those who go on to write history. Love and empathy are themes best left to books and cinema screens. It is not fit for waking life and certainly not for us.”

Why not? Dan wonders. Why couldn’t vampires who actually had a degree of self-awareness and the ability to rationalize be something other than single minded revenants in a horror film who valued destruction as the only universal truth? After centuries of witnessing the worst of history’s atrocities why not value humanity and compassion as something worth upholding? Just the idea that they could sit here and discuss it, that he could ignore the glass full of blood at his side despite his hunger and that he could choose not to hurt any humans in his path despite how easy it would be, testified he could still reason and understand with the same level of empathy he had when he was only just human. That had to imply a greater responsibility against committing cavalier acts of cruelty or becoming indifferent to it.

_I don’t get it. If I had to live through witnessing the after effects of war, torture, discrimination, colonization- I’d hate it. I’m not as old as any of them are and I still hate it. I’d want to change it. I wouldn’t just ignore it or allow it to continue. Existentially, I guess he’s right, certain paradigms and patterns remain the same throughout history. It’s par for the course when you inhabit a planet full of people with diverse experiences, opinions and backgrounds. Everyone’s bound to disagree with someone else and as long as there are people in power with the ability to make life difficult for everyone else there’s bound to be war and unrest, but that doesn’t mean people can’t fight it or stop it. It doesn’t mean because certain things are inevitable or bleak that it’s not worth trying to challenge the status quo in order to change it. If you’re someone who lives in a world where you share equal stake in being affected by the world around you, why wouldn’t you opt to make a better life for yourself and for everyone else? How could trying to give a damn not be worth a damn? No. They’re wrong. No matter how powerful or wise they think they are, they’re wrong. I’d say immortality just made them jaded and detached over time, but I think they’ve genuinely never cared. It’s never been their nature to._

He knows saying anything in his defense will just afford him more scoffing dismissals and mocking jeers of highborn contempt, but he steels himself, gathers his words and speaks anyway. “Caring about one campaign might not stop people dying from cancer or it might not save families from getting caught up in wars they never wanted to be involved in. I know the world is much bigger than just me or one charity or one campaign, but taking action matters, making a decision to be involved in something positive for a change to counter all the negative bullshit that happens every day-that matters. Things can change, through effort and will and just choosing to have a say in your life, things can change. Why shouldn’t it be the kind of change prefaced on giving a damn about other people? I know there are a million other variables and constants at work to make life more complex than it needs to be, but the simplest solution to most of them is taking action based on compassion, on trying to understand other people instead of oppressing them, to give more positive contexts of meaning to a meaningless universe.”

“Ah yes, the same speech you used when I brought up the topic before on the ride over,” Eris replies. “You were just as adamant then in your stance that ‘meaning’ redeemed all ills of human nature, including your own. You said it was why you enjoyed creating videos, because somehow the hope of one human who had been positively affected by your presence mattered in a world full of suffering.”

“Because it does. Because sometimes getting through the day for some people comes down to finding refuge and hope in something with a more relevant, light hearted message to share in the middle of all the suffering.”

“Speaking from experience?” Eris raises an eyebrow, not seriously expecting a reply, but Dan thinks of Phil again- thinks of how this one person with his northern accent and black hair and love of animals; with his ability to see the world in shades of creativity, potential and humor unique only to him, had been a constant source of hope, encouragement and motivation in Dan’s life in ways Dan had never quite been able to tell Phil himself- and as Eris looks at him Dan doesn’t have to think about his answer before he nods and answers, “yes.”

“You really have it quite bad, don’t you?” Eris murmurs after a moment and Dan doesn’t bother to ask her to clarify, not when they both understood and already knew the answer.

Aeacus shakes his head again. “You’re woefully uninformed. Nothing ever truly changes, Daniel. Haven’t you ever read The System of Nature? Everything proceeds along determined paths because it must. Nature is incontrovertible. Human nature is no different. Neither are we. We drink blood because we must, we kill because we must, we preside over the whelps and the centuries because we must and you have no say in any of it even when you think you do, even when you think you might be a vehicle for new revolutions of thought or hope. You’re merely a tiny player acting out a predetermined role. Nothing more. You can’t change these things. We bend to the will of forces and people we sometimes never see, all because we must.”

Inspired, Lethe interjects with a trailing lilt of another makeshift song. “You must dress like this, say that thing, behave this way, play this song, eat this cake, do the dishes, do the dishes, do the dishes...”

“Survival of the fittest has always been evolution’s motto,” Aeacus says as Lethe contentedly drones on beside him. “The world is eternity’s play thing, engineered for endless power plays and acts of oppression since the beginning of time. The eras change in appearance, but under the surface everything remains the same, no matter what people do or say. It’s the same way with you and your profession, a career built on satisfying the demands of strangers who want their marionettes to dance and perform according to their paradigms for who they want you to be.”

Lethe continues her nonsensical ramble, stuck on the same lyric of ‘do the dishes’ like a skipping record until Makhai chucks a dart at the empty wineglass next to her shattering it at once into a pile of shards. She blinks at in silence for a second before shrugging and changing tact to busy herself with nudging the glass shrapnel into a neat circle on the table.

 “Look, I get it,” Dan curtly responds. “Having a public career isn’t always easy, but personally, after getting past the difficult bits of everything to do with establishing authenticity and self-identity when you’re in the spotlight of attention, and also taking into consideration all the astonishing feats of creativity and encouraging messages I see in my twitter feed and dashboard on a daily basis, I’d like to think my relationship to my audience isn’t as insidious as you’re implying.”

Makhai leers at him. “Yeah, you’d like to think so wouldn’t you? It lets you sleep better at night to think you aren’t just a parasite in a symbiotic relationship with other parasites where you’re daily eaten alive for every scrap of commentary you can offer, for every measured response and practiced visual. Makes one wonder who’s the bigger vampire here, you or them? Of course you must call them a ‘community _,_ ’ or better yet, a ‘family’ to make the truth sting a bit less, the way humans love to domesticate the terrifying and make their monsters less than what they are. _Pah_.” Makhai flicks his hand violently in the manner of someone dislodging a settled fly from their skin.

“ _Community,_ ” he mutters. “They once called the crowds at the amphitheaters communities as well. These days the performances are less bloody but they all serve the same end. All spectators, all audiences, crave blood, albeit in different forms and different methods, but the sacrifice amounts to the same. You can’t receive success without giving up a few pints in return. A throat, a wrist, your very heart-it’s blood, your very life source they demand. All of what you are. I’d accept you better if you at least admitted it, but you can’t even admit your flaws to yourself without applying a thick veneer of puerile sentimentality and self-deprecation to soften the blow and they eat up the performance, don’t they, even as you patronize them to their faces? Oh, a human is so easy to please. Give them someone who reflects their inane personal ideals of beauty, humor and goodness and they’re apt to crown him the next messiah. How incredible it must be to win excessive rewards for minimal effort, to cozen the support of a multitude of people willing to waste hours of their day simply to watch you talk. You, the lauded raconteur of a digital age getting by on sad anecdotes of your incompetence while handing out advice about as helpful as a drunk in a bar with too many opinions for how the world should be run and none of the sober wisdom or willpower to get any of it done. You cynical, irrelevant know it all, pushing your values of mercy, compassion, and diplomacy on us when you’ve never had to risk anything but worthless scraps of privacy to be where you are now; with nothing to show for your success- no academic degree, no technical skill or physical aptitude- and nothing to offer anyone but shallow vanity and long winded speeches of navel gazing sophistry masquerading as wisdom.”

He leans across the table, his mouth a vicious downturn of a grimace exposing the intimidating curve of his fangs and although a considerable length of distance divides them Dan sharply leans away against the back of his chair. “You may fool the world but I see you for what you are,” Makhai hisses. “A fraud, an imposter, one who engineers every word and action to carefully deflect the depth of immaturity, ineptitude and fear underneath. You’re afraid no matter what you do or what you say, you will never be good enough and you’re right. You have never been and never will be good enough. And you know this, why else would you prop yourself up in front of millions for the free handouts of praise and adulation they heap on you for doing exactly nothing at all? You affect nothing, you act on nothing, and you are nothing.”

Something strange happens as Makhai continues to stare at him. The eyes, already dark and hateful, pool to occluded pits in his face and despite the horrible emptiness of them, Dan can’t help staring back, compelled by a powerfully hypnotic pull to give his undivided attention until the tinkling scraping sounds of Lethe pushing the remnants of a broken wineglass around the table with her finger begins to fade further and further away into the distance. It’s difficult to look away and when he tries, Dan finds himself curiously unable to, his head suddenly too heavy on his neck like a steel weight moored in place by Makhai’s impassioned denunciations. There’s something wrong here, something more than bit off about this situation which pings at every internal safeguard of self-preservation, but along with finding it difficult to move, it’s suddenly much more difficult to think. All he can do is sit and look and listen in numb compliance as Makhai continues.

“Do you really think compassion and connection is the lynchpin of your success, the true source of meaning in the world which redeems your poor life choices? Do you think contributing to some poor human’s little moment of peace is a big accomplishment- that your pathetic attempts at playing agony aunt to solve their insignificant problems means anything at all? Please. They find greeting cards and car commercials uplifting. Disposable sound bites of pseudo-intellectual claptrap to be forgotten when the next best coping mechanism to suit their idle daydreams comes along. You pretend to be something you’ve never been while we make no qualms about what we are and always will be. We have fangs, power, and indomitable strength ( _body and blood, body and blood_ , the anthem which had poured from the car’s stereo chimes in again from Dan’s subconscious like a mnemonic leitmotif to accompany Makhai’s words.) We wield them all freely without poetic interpretations. Accept what you are and stop pretending you’ve ever been any better than a creature getting by on the capricious whims of strangers who devour your name like you devour their views. It’s prey and predator. It’s never been anything more than that in the history of the world. See yourself as you are for once.  Even cockroaches have a better degree of self-awareness, if you read Kafka anyway.”

Lethe looks up wonderingly and when she speaks her voice echoes strangely, leagues away into the distance like a dream. “Was Samsa really a roach? I thought he was more like a type of rhinoceros beetle. They’re much more pleasant to look at I think.”

“An insect is an insect whatever form it takes. The same goes for all parasites and predators.” Makhai nods his head pointedly at Dan. “I applaud you for playing the game to your advantage, but make no mistake, what you are is a fortunate quirk of biology and the random chance of being in the right place at the right time to reap the benefits of an online career which will barely leave a ripple in the eye of the world at large when the public is through with you. You’re nothing but an anomaly, one more human without a backbone or mentionable talent, with all the social tact of a rock through a window. As a vampire I expect it’ll be no different.”

His eyes bore into Dan’s, huge and dark. “Hear what I say, see what I see, Daniel Howell. See yourself as you have always been since your youth. See the way you’ve stunted your progress for choosing to be weak instead of giving in to your true nature.”

The roaring crackle of burning firewood and the persistent drum of rain outside muffles away to a pure and heavy silence. A disquieting stillness overtakes the room and it reminds Dan of how Yilmaz had caught him with her eyes, pinning him in place like a snake entrancing its prey, rendering it oblivious to everything else in the world even its own sense of survival.

 _This is glamour, none of this is really happening._ He registers the idea absently. He needs to resist, needs to break the hold before it pulls him under completely, but the pertinent urgency of this thought is quickly swept away and replaced with lazy sense of drowsiness instead, like being drunk and drifting along under the buzz of an alcohol induced euphoria with all his inhibitions forgotten.

A sense of vertigo hits him then, a dizzying light headed sensation as if he’d stood up very fast from a seated position and all the blood had rushed to his head in a hurry. This time when he leans against the chair it feels as if he’s falling  
                                                                                                       down  
                                                                                   backwards,  
                                                                       further  
                                                                and  
                                                   further  
                                         down  
                                     all the way through the wood of the backrest out into empty space, regressing years and years into the past as he goes, back to Berkshire, back to secondary, back to the standard colors of his old school uniform, his starched white shirt and pleated trousers; back to hearing his name spoken in guttural jeers of derision echoing about his head as if he’d never left those faded school halls behind. As he walks down a corridor as narrow as the one Eris had just lead him down he’s surrounded by the familiar wasp’s nest of boys waiting for him after class, all of them eager to test his nerve with an offhand remark aimed with the crude accuracy of a rock flung at his back. He veers from the corridor and the path seamlessly transitions to a muddy football pitch in the early morning hours marked by fog and damp where he lines up with the rest of the class already there waiting to be picked for teams. It becomes clear in a matter of seconds if he’s to be chosen at all it would be on the grounds of a last and desperate resort. He sees himself as the others see him, an uncoordinated disaster who once kicked a ball into the path of a train and would be far more useful blending into the dew speckled grass listening to his iPod instead of inflicting his existence on his more athletically inclined teammates. It’s a theme which repeats itself in all his interactions where his refusal to play along labels him as odd, weak and undesirable. His refusal to fight back labels him as worse.

“ _Do you think any of them were impressed by your pacifism and individuality?_ _Do you think any of them were inspired to follow your example?”_ A voice in his ear asks. “ _No, they laughed at you and thanked you for being such an easy target for their punches. You allowed them free reign to do and say as they pleased- you never applied yourself, never said half the things you could have to put them in your place and assert your own. Not out of compassion or objective wisdom-out of fear and vulnerability. You decided you were never strong enough to take them physically and never cunning enough to take them verbally. You declared your own defeat in the face of their challenge as you have with all things since, second guessing every move you’ve ever taken to the point of cheapening your potential. Pacifism never won a war and kindness never stopped a bullet. People respect demonstrations of strength, authority and power, not weakness. Certainly not you.”_

Cavall barks somewhere off in the far distance, an unimportant white noise overpowered by the things Dan begins to see and hear in front of him. Suddenly Makhai’s string of criticisms aren’t abstract insults anymore, they’re observations rooted in fact, playing out evidence of his shortcomings in a reel of memories flickering in front of his vision like a projected image to support the accusations laid before him so that he begins to believe every word without question. Vertigo steps aside and invites dread to try its hand at dragging along behind Dan’s path through his memory. It speaks with Makhai’s graveled inflection and it tells him that he’ll never leave The Forest School; he’ll never leave the monotonous, unpleasant neighborhoods of Reading, that even if he packs up to go somewhere far afield from his hometown, all his old bullies, problems and insecurities will follow him like a bad dream so that no matter what country or career he ever found himself in, one foot would always be on the polished vinyl of a classroom floor, tensing for the daily gauntlet of insults and assaults between lessons.

“ _Because you refuse to do better you will never be any better. You’re not cut out for greatness or accomplishment_ ,” the voice says. “ _In another world at another time you’ll muddle your way through a law degree, putting in half the effort and half the motivation because although you dislike it, memorizing obscure legalities that don’t require much by way of skills you don’t possess is the safer option for someone like you. You’ll end up working in a corporate law firm, a large entity comprised of hundreds of lawyers in which you’ll just be another number to add to the payroll. You won’t even be called on to handle cases, just as your old manager never called on you to do anything more important than dust the tills and arrange the chocolate bars. And if anyone decides that those tired ideals of ‘love’ or ‘friendship’ might be something worth wasting on you, they’ll soon grow tired of your insecure, shrill pretentious whining and leave. And they will make sure to tell you it’s your fault, because you were never good enough to love, never good enough to stick around for, never good enough to listen to, never good enough at being yourself to warrant interest or affection; only good enough to be a temporary plaything to spend a night with and leave right after, because why would anyone want to spend longer than a day attached to someone like you? This is what you’re good for, this is what you deserve.”_

Dan sees it all clearly. The school halls fade to a commercial office located on the top most floors in an anonymous high-rise in London. The tall pane glass windows offer a view of the sprawling skyline occluded by heavy fog and dense cloud cover. Bustling lines of traffic choke the streets many feet below, carrying flotillas of commuters to cubicles in other high-rise buildings around the city. When he looks down at his hands in a daze he sees himself in a nondescript business suit with scratchy cuffs and a tie knotted too snugly around his neck, a drab echo of his old school uniform with the crest on his blazer jacket replaced with an invisible one heralding him as another member of the nine-to-fivers on their way to make the cogs of conglomerate business work. There he is sorting out the tedium of shuffling papers and organizing folders between circuitous trips to the office coffee machine with its unending supply of watered down brew and bog colored tea. His colleagues are periphery shadows he doesn’t interact with beyond exchanging monosyllabic greetings or idle questions about the work in front of him. They exude an aura of indifference about him and the strongest emotion he manages to evoke is a sad kind of pity for someone whose only future in the company appears to be that of bumbling secretary. He doesn’t want to be here, but he must. This was the way of things; this was how the world worked for people like him. He must fall in line to a job he doesn’t want because he has no choice, no skill or willpower to make his private ambitions a reality. Things would never change anyway. He would always hear the same tired insults of his childhood repeated in more polite terms by every employer he ran across. He would always come up short in every job he took, and even in the career he currently held he would always yearn to be someone better, to be someone greater and wiser and yet fail every time.  Why should he try to do anything then, why should he care? Maybe he was wrong and it was true that all the things he’d given importance to really didn’t matter after all. He wasn’t going anywhere. He couldn’t. He never would. That was the way of things.

“ _This is where you belong, this is the place you’ve made for yourself in the world_.” His reflection in the office windows raises its head and speaks to him. “ _Who do you think you are to assume your name deserves more recognition beyond a faded nameplate on an office door, that your words are worth listening to, that all your big plans for ‘creative projects’ isn’t just a lot of talk to compensate for an ingenuity you don’t really possess; what makes you think an entire crowd of people should care enough about your mundane life full of failed social interactions and feats of astonishing incompetence? No. Too weak for manual labor, too flighty for white collar jobs, too unremarkable and inept to be anyone that fits in anywhere. That’s your rightful place, the role you’ve chosen for yourself as one of the many plain faced herd of humans who are seen once in passing and quickly forgotten as minor background characters in the lives of other more noteworthy people who actually have a clue of who they are and what they want to do.”_

Thunderclouds gather on the horizon over the skyline, dark and closing in fast. They reach the windows and seep right through the glass as if it wasn’t there. The clouds billow and fill the office around him in a murky grey soup of fog, wreathing his head with cold. His lips part in a slack quiet sigh and the fog travels down his mouth into his lungs, past his ribcage and around his heart to squeeze the muscle with frigid bands of ice. His reflection is the only visible part of the room he can see now and it whispers how absurd this all is- himself, his life, his decisions and his thoughts- it tells him he’s a fool and a cheat and the sluggish chill invading his head makes it difficult for him to disagree.

 _It’s true. It’s all a joke_ , he thinks in a stupor. _Everything is a joke. I’m a joke and the punchline doesn’t have an ironic delivery good enough to laugh at._

“That’s not very fair you know.” Lethe’s voice drifts up through the air.

“Agreed.” Eris’ voice echoes a reply. “A new blood can’t resist like we can and as interesting as it is to watch him struggle it’d be more productive if you let him be. For now anyway.”

“ _If he were just any new blood I’d relent, but as you recently pointed out, he’s not just any new blood. He’s one of Yilmaz’s progeny, yet he can’t even break the glamour on his own. Look at him. A few more minutes and he’ll be drooling on the floor. I have him in the palm of my hand and I’m not even trying that hard to hold him. This is the type of candidate you have in mind to join with us?”_ The reflection in the glass speaks and as Dan continues to stare at it the features on his face swim out of focus to resemble somebody else, someone he vaguely remembers as having a jeering smile like a hyena.

“ _Look at me, boy_ ,” His shifting doppelgänger in the window commands. “ _See me, see what you could have been if it weren’t for your moral qualms or anxious hesitations.”_

Dan watches, mesmerized, as his double transforms seamlessly into a more physically toned and devastatingly beautiful reflection of himself. It’s still him but a version replicating everything he imagined wanting to be in the future, as if something had rooted around in his brain and discovered what he wanted to change about himself and had found a way to bring it to life in a working demonstration of his ‘authentic self’ in action. He can’t look away from it. The details are too perfect to ignore. In the window his reflection possesses the square lined symmetry of a robust jaw line replacing the previously softer, subtle curves of his face. His body, once a shape he’d long since likened to that of a soggy noodle left to simmer in a pot for too long, has finally shrugged off the last gangly vestiges of puberty and filled out with broad shoulders and rolling swells of deltoids and biceps. He’s become the sought after ideal of every celebrated model in a high fashion mag hailed for their carnal allure and physical prowess with a rippling wall of sculpted abs and delineated muscles flowing under the fabric of his shirt with every move he makes. His eyes are different as well, the color is the same, a deep and refracted shade of brown bringing to mind all things rich, warm and indulgent, but his gaze is far from warm or anything resembling good natured kindness. It’s steeped in an exacting confidence instead, a cold brand of cunning that suggests this version of himself would never suffer fools gladly and would never hesitate to return a cutting remark with a sharper one of his own. He would break an arm before the attached fist could ever reach his face and in a room full of strangers this Dan would have no reservations about commanding their attention, doing so by virtue of his presence alone. If he had ever wryly joked about what he might become in the future, attributing an ironic alliteration of a slogan to rebrand himself with, then this Dan is one he would call deep, dark and dangerous.

His double quietly steps through the glass and strides over to him. Every step is liquid grace; every muscle dips and moves with predatory intent, leaving no impression of clumsiness behind. It stops within centimeters of his face and when the mirror image smiles the fangs in its mouth are longer and sharper than his- wolfish, monstrous. This is a version of himself which would have gleefully drank his fill of blood the first night stumbling out from the flower shop and would have covered up the evidence after without a backward thought about his actions. This Dan would have also just as eagerly finished Phil off within the first minute of him arriving back home. Patience, friendship and diplomacy were not virtues to be counted as part of its arsenal of thought, neither were awkwardness or uncertainty. This is an evolution of character showing what he could become when unfettered by compassion or other restrictions such as anxiety, mortality and doubt. This Dan takes his best aspirations and perverts them into something crueler and more exacting than anything he could imagine on his own and the result is as terrible as it is attractive.

“This is you, as you could be, articulate, capable and above average in every way. It’s everything you will never achieve as you are now for all your attempts to sort out your life.” His other self speaks and it’s his voice, but it’s deeper, more resonant and commanding. “How sad you can’t even live up to your own self-imposed standards.”

Dan stirs at the comment and he frowns. Through the torpid fog in his head something makes to protest, to push this other self away, but it’s hard to focus on why he should feel like resisting at all.

“You can’t even find the nerve to fight me, can you? Because you know it’s true. Not half as good as your audience expects you to be and never as good as you want to be, where does that leave you then? Stuck between the distorted mirror images of what they see and who you can never become.” His other self grows closer and he can feel cold air pouring off its body in waves like it had just stepped out of a walk in freezer. “You’ve been given a rare opportunity of power and potential-an eternity to make something more of your life and you confine yourself to a digitized box of dissenting voices clamoring for encores of tired performances while you stand on soap boxes of humor and wisdom to deliver a message you barely understand yourself. Forever consigned to be the whelp in all ways, the rookie, the amateur, the little boy playing catch up to overcompensate for never being able to be the best or anything good enough to even be considered good enough. You deny us, but you’ve already sacrificed your freedom and identity to a world of strangers who will do worse than even us in the end to revile and reject you once you veer from the script they’ve prepared for you to enact. There are no lesser evils in this world. We always compromise who we are in exchange for better fates. Why not opt for a compromise that will guarantee you a better future? Why not be who you were really meant to be? You know he would choose the same for you if he had the chance.”

Before Dan can ask what it meant by ‘he,’ before he can even move his tongue which has become a leaden weight in his mouth to try to speak, his other self moves aside to show the slow approach of another person walking up beside it. Dan recognizes the silhouette instantly without a second glance needed to clarify and before long the figure steps from the shadows into the muted light of the scene, revealing the familiar raven black hair, lithesome stature and piercing blue eyes to confirm their identity.

 _Phil,_ he thinks in a daze _._

But it’s not. This Phil shares some of the other’s characteristics, but he’s changed as well, his entire form and demeanor shaped with the same cold perfection and stunning beauty of his illusory double, just as toned and agile, his blue eyes empty of their usual lighthearted cheer and filled instead with calculated assuredness. It’s not Phil, but Dan’s heart drops all the same as he watches this other Phil greet his perfected self with genuine delight and a depth of attraction he can only call love. It’s there in the way Phil sets his hand on his other self’s shoulder, pulling him in close and holding his gaze, both of them quietly sharing a secret like a dark promise of a vow communicating all the things they would do together in private.

Jealousy ignites and blooms like a lit match although Dan knows in essence he’s only being jealous of himself, agonizing over two people who aren’t really them at all. It’s ridiculous and absurd and he believes everything he sees with a despairing sense of loss.

His other self turns away from Phil to look at him again but Phil continues to stare at his double with a viciously proud and hungry look as if he were already envisioning exactly what they would do together once they had the chance, be it murder or sex.

“In your place he would find someone better than you,” the other Dan says. “Someone who embodied everything you could never be, someone who could help him become the ideal, more confident version of everything he’s always yearned to become and could never achieve around you. If love is a contest of character you’ll end up losing every time, restless, vague creature that you are. You have no idea why you’re here or what to do with any of the gifts you’ve been granted. You waste your potential and instead search for relevancy in a small niche of entertainment, relying on strangers to show you your self-worth. Do you really think you can play the game forever? Do you really think all your talk of memes, inspiration and compassion will be enough to suffice? All performers invite their own self-destruction and every day is a panicked frenzy to say something interesting, to deliver a one line routine that will make them laugh, and for what, if the effort will never be good enough for you or for them? All audiences are comprised of empty minded, opinion stuffed people who will never see you as you want to be seen and when their use of you is done, when they allow themselves to grow dissatisfied and cynical of their prior adorations, they’ll toss you aside like a disused napkin to look for their next best fix of gratification. You were made into a god, a small one, but a god nonetheless and you would spurn those gifts to belittle yourself in favor of the small box of a computer screen full of dissonant voices all demanding your attention as you do for theirs, tuning into their comments like so much electronic static, tales told by idiots-”

“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Phil murmurs the end of the quote and he closes in on the other Dan’s mouth, delivering a deep and searing kiss that makes the cold bands of ice around Dan’s heart constrict into spikes through his chest. It only lasts a bare few seconds but for Dan looking on it seems to play itself out for an obscenely long amount of time. A flash of teeth and tongue, roving fingers, flexing skin, the taut arch of Phil’s body leaning into the sensuous grind of the other Dan’s hips- every detail of their touch becomes magnified into a drawn out performance that gives Dan the uneasy impression of being a voyeur, although in essence, he’s only watching a projected reflection of himself make out with a reflection of Phil.

 _Wonder if there’s a name for that,_ he wonders dazedly. _If you’ve got selfcest, then what describes watching yourself kiss someone else’s other self?_

His double pulls away and licks its bottom lip slowly, deliberately, and Dan can see the points of its fangs now tinged with a drop of blood, cherry red and glistening.

 “You can change your name and alter your appearance,” it says, “but as long as you cling to your human failings you will always be the same as you are now. You will always end up losing everything to be exactly nothing. But maybe it’s better if you do, for our sake as well as his.”

Phil turns and looks at him for the first time and his face is full of contempt. He says nothing, but the dismissal in his expression is clear. It communicates, _I don’t want you_. _You’re nothing I’d ever want to be with. You’re just not good enough. You never have been. If I had to choose between you both, I’d always choose him over you._

 _“That’s not true_. _You know it’s not true.”_ Another voice in his subconscious speaks up in sudden denial and the strident tone of encouragement sounds more like the Phil he recognizes, the true reflection of the Phil he admired who was nothing like the empty illusion before him; who had fought through the worst of the storm and was now making his way through a basement in a house full of vampires who would inflict worse punishments than cruel words or illusions if they found him, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that everything being said is merely a projection of everything Dan already thought to be true anyway, usually haunting him in those dark early morning hours when he became trapped by too many ideas and prolonged meditations of all his perceived failures to sleep.

 _“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ve always been good enough and more. None of this is real. You know that.”_ The other voice persists and although Dan yearns to believe it, even as he reaches for the comforting familiarity of the person the voice belongs to, someone who isn’t anything like the false image projected in front of him, he’s too weak to think anything else but, _isn’t it though? Isn’t it real?_

At that, the other version of Phil turns away and tilts his head, offering his neck instead of his mouth for more than a kiss. Dan’s mirrored self obliges, cupping the back of Phil’s head as Phil places a hand on the taut swell of its chest for support. With dismayed fascination, Dan watches on as his reflection nuzzles the column of Phil’s throat, searching for the taut rope of the jugular bulging under the skin, swollen and ripe with blood, before its lips curl back in a smile of a snarl and it bites down in the same deep, searing manner of the kiss they’d just shared.

Phil arches into the bite just as he had with the kiss and he moans low in his throat. It’s the same guttural sound of pleasure Dan remembers hearing hours before when they’d lain together under the sheets of his bed. The flare of jealousy smolders and he closes his eyes, tries to wake up, to will the vision away, but the cold fog weighing down his thoughts pushes back to hold him in place, commanding his undivided attention.

A disembodied voice says, “this is what you could have if you’d stop denying the urge of your nature. He’d give you everything. Every drop of his blood yours for the taking, because what is love really if not one more sacrifice to be enjoyed to the zenith of pleasure and satisfaction, like any predator will ravage its prey for every last bit of meat off its bones? You already know what it means to live off of others, to use them to your advantage to survive, to take whatever you can when you can. So tell me, _entertainer_ , just how is your life any different than ours? When have you ever not been the vampire and when have your audience ever not been your easy prey? You’re no different than us. You never have been.”

“No.” Dan manages to speak for the first time and the word escapes him in a breathy horrified sigh. The tableau continues in front of him- Phil being slowly drained by his perfected self, the both of them locked in a sinuous embrace he knows only one of them will walk away from.

“No,” he says again. “That’s not true. That isn’t me.”

“Of course it is. Underneath the two bit act of pandering schmaltz, this is who you truly are, who you were always meant to be. This is you, as powerful and exalted as you could become. These are the apex type personalities who succeed in the world, the ones who garner the most respect and acclaim, the ones unafraid to take what they want, to never procrastinate or falter, to have the audacity to be cunning and strong and vicious in their intent. In short, to be everything you aren’t. You want this. I can smell it on you, the need, the hunger, the overwhelming want- this is everything you wish you were.”

“No. It’s not.” But this time when he says it he’s not so sure anymore.

He totters backwards, suddenly sick to his stomach. The room spins. Somewhere a dog is barking and people are talking and all around him the illusory fog ridden world in his imagination looms too real and oppressive for him to escape. The disembodied voice laughs and the sound of it fills the world with a booming note of mockery. Phil’s double joins in even as his body goes slack from blood loss. Their conjoined laughter is deafening, bowing Dan’s spine with the sudden need to curl up in a dark space far away, left alone to recover and try to forget everything he’s just seen and heard, but their laughter rises in volume, omnipresent and painfully loud and he cries out for it to, “stop, Stop! JUST STOP!”

“Makhai- enough.” Aeacus’ voice cuts through the din, silencing it at once.

“So be it. Have your marionette back. It’s clear with or without glamour, he’ll always be a puppet on strings.”

Makhai looks away and as soon as he does the connection immediately breaks. The mirror double clones freeze in place like a buffering video and already they look like bad caricatures Dan finds impossible to believe he’d ever thought were real. They hold their forms a second longer before fading to shadowy blobs and drifting apart like smoke. Gone, just like that, like the cheap illusion they’d been all along. In their absence, Dan hurtles back to the present with a violent start, arms and legs jerking in place as if he’d just awoken from a nightmare. In a way he thinks that’s exactly what’s happened. Exhausted by the effort of fighting against the illusion, his body slides sideways in the chair, too quickly to catch himself in time and too weak to even try. He collapses to the floor, barely managing to brace the impact with his arms inches before his nose can collide with the hard wood. Meanwhile, the sounds of the room roar back to life around him. The fireplace returns with its crackling riot of burning firewood, thunder booms out over the house and Cavall anxiously paces the floor in front of him, barking relentlessly.

The illusion is gone but the sensation of cold fog lingers in Dan’s head and it’s unpleasant how it feels as if he’s had every important boundary crossed, like Makhai had reached down into his skull, helped himself to a tour of his brain and pawed through every private secret and deepest fear, scrambling all his most intimate thoughts together to create a parody of his memories.

_That’s… what I did to Fergus. That’s how it must have been for him too. Like I reached in and planted false suggestions to get him to think what I wanted him to think. God, I feel sick._

When he blearily glances up at the glass of blood on the end table next to him he almost crawls over to it, intending to gulp it down in the hope the taste might clear his head of the memory of what had just happened, like the hot kick of alcohol might clear his sinuses, but it only reminds him of seeing his other self with Phil, licking away drops of blood the same color as the blood in the glass. His gorge rises at the comparison and he quickly turns away.

Cavall finally stops his mincing anxious dance, but his back continues to heave as if he were trying to catch his breath after such a heated marathon of nonstop barking. Apparently satisfied that the danger of the moment had passed and Dan was no longer in the throes of his mysterious stupor, Cavall approaches to lick the back of Dan’s hand with a warm wet flicker of his tongue. Dan responds by crooking a finger through the ropes around his hands to gently rub the soft patch of fur around Cavall’s nose. He’d never considered the science behind pet therapy before, the strangely healing properties involved with petting an animal or merely being in its presence, but there must be something for it as he begins to feel more grounded in himself and his surroundings. The relief is only temporary however as the scene from before continues to play out in his head on an exhaustive loop. He doesn’t need the benefit of glamour to once again see himself as the portrait of his best physical and intellectual aspirations. It’s too vivid and perfect for him to forget. A slinking feeling of yearning, of undeniable greed and hunger, simmers at the base of his belly. It’s a gut instinct rooted in pure jealousy, a need to have everything his imaginary double possessed, to take it by force if necessary. A part of him even finds it hard to deny he’d very much enjoyed the idea of draining Phil of every last drop of his blood without the guilt of his previous snafu to weigh him down. It’s a visceral, terrible thing to admit and he tries not to wonder if this was just his vampiric nature talking or merely a heightened projection of his own thoughts.

 _Which is the part that wants him and which is the part that wants him?_  It’s the same question from before, followed up by a new one: W _hich part of me is really Dan and which part of me has just been a cover for the real Dan all along? Past the subterfuge of doubt, anxiety and philosophical angst- who really is Daniel Howell?_

It’s suddenly hard to remember, not with the memory of every uncomfortable revelation he’d been forced to witness holding center stage in his head. None of it had been true, but then again…considering Makhai had played on suggestions which already existed to some extent in his thoughts, what if some part of it was? What if he was every bit the cheat and the fool and he’d just been pretending otherwise all along? What if his valued tenets of love and compassion was just a windscreen for not wanting to admit that empathy didn’t matter in the grand scheme of life at all; that it would never be enough to shake long established paradigms of corruption and greed and that who he was at heart was more brutal and self-serving than he’d ever wanted to admit so that he truly was no better than the Court in theory or practice? If people searched for signs and circumstances to confirm their own deeply rooted biases then what if he hadn’t been doing the same his entire life, looking to examples of wisdom, compassion and empathy as redeeming truths in the face of a meaningless universe, basing his worldview off of children’s cartoons like Winnie the Pooh and snippets of quotes from philosophers whose thoughts mirrored his own about humanity, when the exact opposite had been true all along? What if he really was every bit the ‘gormless drone,’ spouting off the bad cliff notes version of what better people before him had already said while resorting to a bad imitation of everything he aspired to be as a cover for how afraid, alone and unsure he really felt, just like the Court accused him of? What if having a voice to speak and to fight back simply wasn’t enough to change things or people’s minds, including his own? What if it wasn’t just a conceit to say his entire life amounted to a bad cosmic joke, what if he really was just the human embodiment of a long running gag of failure and disappointment in which nothing he ever did or said would matter and what if every attempt to cultivate his authentic self always eluded him so he would remain that gangly, weird boy in secondary despite the passage of time or becoming a vampire?

His thoughts don’t resemble a dark churning pool anymore so much as they feel like a hurricane the size of the one locked onto Saturn’s north pole, a monstrous vortex with nowhere to go and no end in sight. He allows his arms to gently lower him down and he goes limp against the floor. Behind the table, George makes as if to rush over to help him up but then hesitates, unsure if he should move at all when the Court hadn’t command him to. Dan gives a wan smile and slowly shakes his head to communicate he was okay right where he was.

_It’s fine, just having a cheeky lie down on the floor. Think I’m going to hang out here for a while, maybe a few hours, a couple of years, hell- make it a decade. That should do the trick. Sometimes when everything in your head is too much to take, you need to adjust yourself to floor level, become one with the dust specks and switch off for a bit. Therapeutic planking. Not exactly the most conventional of self care methods but it’s all the hype._

On finding him like this, Phil would have told him he was thinking too much again; he wasn’t focusing on things as they were, that he was hurting himself by fixating on things which weren’t real no matter how vivid and painful they seemed in his head. Dan knows in this instance he wouldn’t have hesitated to agree, but not thinking too much was easier said than done when he couldn’t escape his own head, more so when Phil isn’t there to distract him with a prodding reminder to breathe and to remember who and where he was and that things stood a better chance of looking better in the morning if he would only allow himself to rest. In Phil’s absence, without any recourse to sleep and a body that no longer needs to breathe, Dan is left with nothing else to do but lose himself in the bleak memory of Phil’s apathetic double regarding him with revulsion and disdain, loathe to even look at him let alone offer a word of friendly advice.

Just an illusion, he tries to remind himself, not based on the real Phil at all, not when Phil himself had fought the worst of the storm and was currently on his way through the basement to meet Dan in a house full of vampires who would inflict worse punishments than cruel words or illusions if they found him. That reality spoke volumes more than any induced hallucination Makhai could inflict, but a part of him still bogged down by the murky fog of doubt from before wonders if maybe, in the future, if they managed to survive this evening to have the opportunity to share other evenings together, Phil might not one day wake up to the realization that he was done wasting any more time in Dan’s presence and wanted to test the waters with other more interesting people instead. People who knew exactly who they were and what they wanted to do and who were prepared to enjoy life unfettered by internal doubts or insecurities like him.

 _Phil would never,_ Dan thinks. _He’s not like them, he’s not someone who would just walk away from the people he loved on a whim. He would never._

But the disembodied voice slinks back from the shadows of his subconscious to ask, ‘ _are you so certain? You’re not even sure about yourself, can you really say you’re sure about him?’_

Forget laying down on the floor for a decade, Dan thinks he’ll need nothing short of a century’s long cryogenic sleep to shake off the darker thoughts currently plaguing his head.

Cavall gently prods the tousled curls of Dan’s hair and the cold wet of his nose startles Dan out of his second waking nightmare that evening. He idly rubs Cavall’s paw with the tip of his finger as a small ‘thank you’ and swallows down another suffocating pocket of air gathering in his throat.

The Court meanwhile ignore his new horizontal position and continue their ongoing discussion in tones broaching an argument. They’re talking about him again of course, debating his worth like a trinket to be haggled over, but his head is too full of his own louder arguments to focus on anything they’re saying. He gets the gist however. Other than Makhai, the rest of the Court wants him to join, to become one of them and just like before when he’d been hypnotized by the smell of blood from the locked room in the hallway, he finds himself curiously drawn to the idea, this time more out of sheer exhaustion and the perceived futility of resisting.

Part of him wants to accept the bargain. It was the easiest option available in the midst of more complex emotions and ideas he can’t take. In some ways, everything Makhai had said was true. Audiences could be fickle and although nothing was certain, neither was the idea that he would always enjoy the same numbers of viewers as he had over the past few years. At the same time, YouTube could flounder at any moment and no longer be a viable platform welcoming to any creator, be they newcomers or veterans, and in the presence of waning relevancy and interest from those who might extend offers or opportunities to expand his creative ventures beyond a computer screen, where might that leave him? If he had no media contacts to make references on his behalf, no university degree to prop up a résumé with, no audience who might follow along with every change in creative presentation or character, and no way to gracefully bow out of a sinking ship if YouTube truly did go under one day, then why not take the promise of a sure thing instead? Who was to say he couldn’t find his own brand of success here? People balked at the idea of sponsorships and advertisements, afraid of being labeled ‘sell outs,’ but when the chips were down and the numbers too good to pass up, suddenly product placements and spokesperson positions didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all, not if it was just a means to a better end. People did what they could to survive and if it didn’t hurt someone, if it was just an innocent way to make money in an industry where advertisements were just an inevitable part of the numbers game then, why not? And if the Court meant to impose their presence in other more inevitable ways he could never escape, then why not use them before they used him? Why not learn all the moves of their game to become every bit the perfected vision Makhai had shown him to later use his newfound skills and strengths against them when they least expected it? So what if the company was miserable and their party guests worst, he’d no longer have to fight himself, no longer have to deal with wondering what or who he might become in the future, not when he’d be handed all the resources he needed to make it a reality regardless of viewer statistics and advertising campaigns.

_We always compromise who we are in exchange for better fates. Why not opt for a compromise that will guarantee you a better future?_

Makhai’s words run through his head and he dazedly wonders, yes, why not? Better than lying on the floor without a plan wondering if his thoughts might tear him apart from the inside out.

What was stopping him from playing along to defy their authority later while enjoying all the perks which came with being one of them now, without doubts, fears or inhibitions to stop his progress? They had probably learned how to circumvent plenty of rules in their lifetime including their own, who was to say he couldn’t do the same?

On the heels of that idea another thought suddenly pops into his head, bringing to mind Aeacus’ rousing speech from before and the words sound like a warning instead of an incentive: “ _We are your reflection. See us and see what you could be._ ”

Dan sluggishly moves his head into a better position to peer up at the members of the Court seated at the table.

The scavengers take new shapes now in his imagination. They no longer resemble ravenous hybridized creatures but appear more like androgynous versions of himself staring back with his face and figure superimposed over each of them. In Eris he’s a more striking, deliberate collection of arrogant smirks, sharp remarks, sharp nails and sharper rejoinders. He’s danger incarnate; ominous, beautiful and completely unpredictable. In Makhai he’s the perfected ideal of a statuesque Adonis- a more exacting version of himself with all the ‘softness’ carved away. No reticence, awkwardness or hesitation here. As Makhai he’s unrelenting and powerful, much more curt and vicious than Eris, but no less stunning or capable; no less monstrous. In Aeacus, he’s the superior authority instilled with wisdom, the elder he might become as immortality counted down past the centuries into millenias- a grizzled veteran of eternity, suffering the whelps in his path with tempered patience and condescension. In Lethe, he’s the apathetic dreamer, content to while away the hours with his own versions of reality, to forget past regrets and replace them with idealistic notions of the present to the exclusion of everything else, to the detriment of memory, time and place until he forgot them all, including his own name. They’re ambassadors of something other than vice or the deadly sins, a warning of the things he could become if he allowed them to divert his identity to subsume theirs instead. In them he recognizes the excesses of concepts and ideas he had once imagined wanting for himself, physical and intellectual milestones he wanted to achieve and embrace here turned into menacing parodies. But past the surface he sees the reflections of scavengers again, of creatures reaching for him with claws and fangs extended, ready and eager to devour. The offer to attain their formidable power is tempting, but even if he thought he could successfully find a way to survive amongst them and despite whatever aspects of their personalities he admired even with their character flaws, he doesn’t want to be their willing protégé for them to mold in their image; to become a spokesperson representing a cause of cruelty and malice he doesn’t support.

Despite knowing that, a small voice suggests that relenting is still the simplest option. He’d gone over this dilemma before, tottering back and forth between the decision of going along with them or digging in his heels to resist.  It’d be easier to fool himself into thinking he could go along with the Court and rally his strength in secret to defy them later, but he can see himself there at the table in a few years’ time, seated between Eris and Makhai, swirling blood around in a wineglass, staring down his nose at another new blood in his place with the same kind of imperious contempt. They’d force him to sacrifice independence of will until, given enough time and influence, he’d forget he’d ever been anyone else but one of them or that he’d ever had a life full of ambitions apart from their own.

That wasn’t a compromise. That was admitting his defeat before he’d even rose to the challenge to fight back. He had to believe he still held some measure of influence here, that he could defy them just as he was, here and now, in spite of every bad thought which suggested who he was at this very moment wasn’t enough to suffice

He couldn’t control certain elements about the world around him or about what people thought and saw when they looked at him, just as he couldn’t control what he had become- a vampire, an immortal creature which towed the line between human and inhuman- but if the past few days dealing with his new transformation had taught him anything it was to confirm what he already thought true, that self-worth was subjective and identity was mutable. It was possible to defy all expectations and be someone stronger and more capable than other people’s criticisms, including his own. The past few days had also taught him via Teague’s and Phil’s example that human nature aligned itself more towards good less so according to Aeacus’ brutal interpretation of the System of Nature, and Dan had summarily found he enjoyed life considerably more when it did. He had also found that it wasn’t necessary to put a name to every experience and feeling and that two people could love each other just fine without ever having to say the word itself or attaching any definition to it at all. Meaning was relative and as long as it was, anything could be ascribed with importance; anything held the potential to encourage, motivate and inspire, be it in the unspoken signs and gestures of synchronal empathy found between two human beings who cared for each other or in relatable non sequiturs about the absurdities of life. That was enough for him, just as who he was at this moment in time, a twenty six year old boy turned immortal creature, still trying to find his voice and place in the world despite all external obstacles and objections; despite all internal doubts and reservations, was more than enough as well. Even if he never changed the world, even if he never left more of an impact on people’s lives than a memorable six minute video and even if he never rose to the Court’s standards of greatness and ascendance throughout his tenure of eternity, it would always still be enough. Immortality itself wasn’t a guarantee of survival and if he did blinker out of existence one day in the long yawning course of the future, fading into obscurity as Makhai suggested, without so much as a thirty character long tweet left behind for future anthropologists to puzzle over, he thinks the time he’d spent pursuing his creative goals and enjoying the company of those who mattered most in his life would have been more than enough to suffice for the trouble of existing.

_I can’t let them get to me. I can worry about the existential implications later when it inevitably comes back to bother me on the days I least expect it or want it to, because there really are some things difficult to change when it comes to a brain subject to dynamics of chemistry and stimuli you can’t control, whether you’re undead or not, but I can’t worry about it right now. I have to survive long enough to leave this room, get to Phil and get out of this house. That’s the endgame. Everything else can wait for me to agonize about later. It doesn’t make me feel any better about the situation or this black hole spinning about in my head, but for right now, I have to work with what I have, even if it’s exactly nothing…_

He looks at each member of the Court again in turn, watches as they continue to discuss him in third person as if he weren’t there, debating his right to be considered worthy enough to live and he thinks, _no, I don’t want to live with you or be like you. Nothing’s worth the trouble of trying. And whatever time I have left, whatever future I get to enjoy, it’ll be one I decide to make for myself, a future without any of you in it._

It’s a strong declaration but he doesn’t feel particularly strong as he thinks it. He feels spent, world weary and physically beat, and if a genie had come along at that moment to ask what he most wished for in the world he thinks he’d ask for nothing more than to be allowed to remain inert, stretched out on the floor to recover. He knows he can’t. He knows he has to move, has to act, do whatever he can to push against them, but the sickening reel of his stomach stays with him despite his convictions, a heady sensation made of equal parts stubborn resolve and pure fear as he psyches himself up to be brave in the face of not knowing what might happen next.

What happens next however happens swiftly, without warning, and it instantly obliterates the need to remain on the floor as a dull explosion abruptly rocks the house.

Dan bolts up to his feet and Cavall lets out an outraged volley of barks, his hackles raised in visible alarm. The lamps around the room flicker as the aftershock of the explosion ebbs away in rippling vibrations along the floor, shivering the blood in the decanter like the tremored footstep of an approaching T-Rex. The Court however remains largely unconcerned except for Lethe who shoots up from her chair and yells, “ _termites!_ ” at the top of her lungs.

“Don’t be a little fool!” Makhai snaps.

Lethe whirls around and in one fluid motion she hurls the vase of lilies at Makhai’s face narrowly missing his head as he ducks, leaving the vase to shatter on the floor.

 “Don’t yell at me!” Lethe’s face deforms into a picture of menace, her hands balled into fists.

 “You’re the one yelling, you maniac!”

“Because of the termites!”

“For the last time, there are no termites!” The veins in Makhai’s neck bulge, ready to explode.

“How do you know?!” Lethe’s mottled face looks equally ready to combust. “And stop yelling! It’s so loud I hate it! I hate it!”

 Aeacus slams the table with the flat of his palm and the sound is like a gavel striking a judgment. Lethe and Makhai immediately fall silent, but they remain glaring at each other in red faced frustration.

 “Calm yourselves! Both of you! It’s only the storm.” Aeacus frowns and gestures for Lethe to take her seat again which she does, falling into it sulkily like a child having a tantrum.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Eris remarks. “Such raw power and violence, with thunder strong enough to shake the house. In all the centuries of storms I’ve experienced in London I’d say this one is the prize winner.”

Makhai picks off a discarded lily petal from his shoulder as he agrees. “In my time we had storms that created surges along the Mediterranean coast which were ten times worse, so powerful it wiped out an entire fleet of ships in one evening, but I’ll grant you, this one is impressive even by those standards. But now, back to the subject about this whelp becoming one of us-”

They fall into the rhythm of their previous discussion without another word about the explosion, Lethe joining in with a distinctly miffed look on her face as Makhai warily eyes her for any more flower throwing outbursts. George however quickly glances at Dan and they exchange a brief, knowing look, the both of them united in the uneasy knowledge that the sound hadn’t been thunder at all. Dan had felt the vibration through the floorboards pressed against his cheek, had heard the muted roar resonate from the depths of the house below instead of above, more specifically as if it had come from the basement, exactly where Phil was supposed to be.

Cavall goes on barking the entire time and he races back and forth to the doors with a deliberateness that can only be interpreted as a demand to be let out.

“So loud, so loud! Mr. Pringles, please be quiet.” Lethe waves her hand at Cavall to shush him, but he continues barking, his entire body shaking from nose to tail with the effort.

“George, let that dog out before I chuck it in the fireplace,” Makhai says.

“Yes, of course.” George bows his head and swiftly moves to comply. He crosses over to the doors and he hasn’t pulled them apart more than six inches before Cavall sprints through the opening and escapes down the darkened corridor, his barks echoing behind him like a siren as he goes until suddenly, inexplicably, they stop, cutting off into silence as if he’d disappeared into thin air.

“That’s so odd every time he does that. Don’t you think it’s odd?” Lethe looks over at Eris. “He just up and goes and appears somewhere else in the house even though we’ve never let him out through the locked entrance in the mirror.”

Eris gives a disinterested shrug of one shoulder. “Most vermin always find ways to squeeze through the smallest cracks in walls and under doors. It’s not really so surprising he should do the same.”

Makhai aims a dart and throws it at the doorframe where it lands quivering beside George’s head, startling him out of his trance of staring into the long shadows of the hall. “I don’t think I need to tell you to close the doors as well, do I?”

“I-I’m sorry. I thought I saw someone- dressed like one of the guests downstairs, in a mask, walking into the wall, but that’s impossible.” George shakes his head and quickly shuts the doors before another dart could land itself in his ear instead of the molding. “Sorry.”

“Wonderful,” Makhai says dryly. “One sees termites, the other sees ghosts. What stimulating company we keep.”

George once more takes up his place of silent sentry behind the table and the Court resume their talk, uninterrupted by either bombshell blasts of thunder or chatty dogs this time. Without a way to leave to investigate the source for himself and nothing else to do but stand in place like a statue, Dan awkwardly sits back down, every nerve on edge.

It _had_ been an explosion. He was sure of it, just as he was sure Cavall must have sensed it too. He can’t sense anything other than the usual scents in the room, the hot tang of burning tinder, the ozone and moisture of the rain, the faintly acrid odor of gas pervading the house and the rancid funereal smell of dread surrounding the Court, but he’s positive something had happened in the basement, something monumental and critically dire, and a part of his instinct which has nothing to do with being a vampire also tells him that whatever had occurred downstairs has something to do with Phil.

He no longer feels as if he’s stuck in limbo. Suddenly his sense of time has sped up to a frothing point of urgency. Something is brewing on the outskirts of his periphery where he can’t see and he has a feeling things will soon come to a head to change things in ways no one in this room, including him, might be quite prepared for and that vague sense of pervading danger growing in size with every passing minute as he sits frozen in his seat without a plan of action makes him suddenly more afraid than he’d been before.

The Court goes about their animated discussions, oblivious to his alarm and past the racket of the storm and his own inner turmoil all he can think is, _Phil- whatever the fuck is happening right now, wherever you are, please- be safe._

 

_☾❧☽_

                         

Phil doesn’t feel safe. Nor does he feel particularly brave. He would have screamed without embarrassment or reservation from the first moment the frigid hand had clamped onto his shoulder, but fear pins his tongue to the roof of his mouth and renders him mute. No sense falling back on false bravado here he thinks, not when he doesn’t know what he’ll find standing behind him once he fully turns around, be it a phantom, a demon or an eight armed humanoid wasp beast. At this point, after dealing with disgruntled vampires and disembodied voices in underground tunnels, he’s open to expect anything.

It’s the very act of turning to confront the thing which bothers him most, the way the first step of any endeavor always proved to be the most daunting. He should get it over with, bottle his nerve and rip off the plaster; face down whatever is there with the best of his courage however scarce in supply it currently seems, like being a child again and closing his eyes as he navigated his bicycle over and down the steep embankment of a tall hill, zipping out into freefall with nothing more than the audacity of will to support him,  but he’s not a child anymore and he’s not just trying to prove his worth in front of a group of boys at school. He’s in the basement of a house full of eldritch vampires, alone without Teague to guide him this time, with an unknown figure’s gaze boring into the back of his head and he feels as if he’s stuck in the dark of the tunnel again with his back pressed against the cold rock face of the wall, his body petrified into inaction and his mind uselessly droning on, “ _I can’t, I can’t, I don’t want to_.” But he knows he must and the hand on his shoulder communicates the same, its weight bearing down on him with implacable, terrible strength compelling him to turn and after another moment’s hesitation, he finally does.

 At first glance he really does think it’s a beast, not a wasp but a hybrid of conflicting species in which neither was recognizable as human at all, with a grotesque, viperous head and a tall, sinuous body covered in sickly white scales. Its looming height almost matches his own and it furthers the impression of a monstrous serpent, reared back and balancing on its tail, readying itself to strike at his face. The clenched grip on his shoulder seems to draw him forward, closer to the angled head with its impossibly large staring eyes, both of them horrifically dark as the tunnel he’d just climbed out of, and the scream bubbling at the base of his throat nearly barrels its way out of his mouth.

It takes another confused second and a third hard blink for him to realize that the “beast’s head” amounts to nothing more than an elaborately crafted Venetian mask and its “scaly body” is just a slim fitting gown of white lace in shifting patterns resembling scales. On closer inspection, once his eyes catch up to his brain’s attempt to rationalize his first horrific impressions, the mask reveals itself to be that of a cat instead of a snake. The features however are exaggerated to a point of severe abstraction with vestigial ears and a pointy diamond shaped physiognomy to make it look more anguiform than feline, or like a cat crossed with a dragon.

 _What would you call that then_ , he thinks dazedly. _A drat? A catgon?_

Whatever animal the mask is supposed to represent at least now he can tell the figure underneath it is distinctly human, not an otherworldly abomination after all. However, he still can’t say whether the person might only be human in appearance and might actually instead be a vampire like Teague, but on venturing a guess, based on the frigidity of the hand and the chatoyant eyes peering back at him through the wide slots of the mask’s eyeholes like two dots of light in the darkness, he thinks it more than likely that’s exactly what the person is. If this vampire meant him any harm was another question entirely and as the hand drops away from his shoulder he thinks he won’t have to wait long for the answer.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

The person, what he takes to be a woman with a long plait of grey-white hair dangling behind her back, finally speaks and her voice carries a distinct flourish of an accent he can’t place. Her tone is easier to distinguish though and he’s somewhat relieved to hear no implication of a threat behind her words. She says it like an idle observation instead, as casually as commenting on the weather.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says again when he doesn’t immediately reply.

“Oh, I…I’m sorry. I was wandering around and I guess I just lost my way.” The answer escapes him in a halting wheeze, half of his words caught on the raw edge of the scream he’d been preparing to vocalize and he hopes the quickened pace of his heart doesn’t reveal him as a liar.

The art of dissembling when put on the spot had never been his strong suit. His mother had always been able to pick out every subtle physical tell of nervousness and cagy deflection to know when he was being anything less than honest with her. Even attempting harmless pranks on Dan proved hardest of all when he couldn’t help cracking a nervous smile as he tried to convince Dan to try a bag of top tier Scoville ranking spicy gummi bears instead of the “magically flavor changing sweet ones” he tried to pawn them off as.

For all he knew, the woman might have already sensed he was lying in the same way Dan had been able to sniff out the scent of panic and frustration on him with the ease of a blood hound. He wonders then what guilt smells like, if it was at this moment spiking the air with a particular kind of bad BO not even soap and water could wash away. He tries to reason with himself that what he’d said had only been a white lie at best anyway, the kind of half-truth he usually relied on to twist the facts just a little when he thought his nerves might betray him if he tried to invent a more fanciful story likely to fall apart under scrutiny later. Better to keep it simple and keep a grain of truth in the lie to make it comfortable enough for him to say. Besides, he really _had_ lost his way in the tunnel, only after losing Teague first, goaded into following his flight impulse by a spectral voice taunting him at every turn until he’d all but flailed his way to the hidden entrance of the basement on sheer luck and blind panic. Yet, a sliver of doubt makes him nervous after answering and keeps his heart pounding away like a biological snitch in his chest. If Dan, just a new blood, was able to sniff out the slightest change in his emotions then what else could a vampire older than Dan be able to sense about him? Could this particular vampire for example be gifted enough to sniff out the details of everything he leaves unsaid to realize that he was an intruder tasked with the singular mission of rescuing his best friend in defiance of the Court and their authority. It leaves him with the uneasy thought of wondering if the woman might be a member of the Court herself and on the heels of that thought he also wonders what she might do to him if she managed to figure out his true purpose here.

He tries not to worry about the impending consequences likely to occur if caught and focuses his efforts instead on calming the pace of his heart against hammering away like a frightened bird in his chest.

“Yes, you really have lost your way,” The woman says. “Through mud and rain and worse by the looks of you.” She pointedly stares at his feet. In the adrenaline rush of fright, he’d almost forgotten about the aftermath of his unpleasant trek through the culvert and on looking down he’s dismayed to be reminded of the state of his white trainers lathered in a thick coat of sludge, grime and other unmentionable bits of debris he could do without identifying. When he glances off to the side he’s more disturbed to notice a trailing path of his own footsteps marring the floor in large clots of mud and with a sinking feeling in his stomach he realizes that if followed, that same path would lead directly to the hidden trapdoor only a few feet away from where they stood. No sense worrying about lying now, not if the woman decided to turn forensic investigator to figure out exactly where he’d come from.

He’s not sure whether to feel relieved or apprehensive when she sidesteps the messy prints on the floor, ignoring them completely as she approaches a step closer than before.

“Curious.” She slowly paces around him in wide circle, staring at him inquisitively through her mask. “Most humans invited to the Court’s galas don’t make it far enough through the night to have the privilege of wandering around and I don’t recall the Court having invited any humans to tonight’s gathering. You’re certainly not dressed for the occasion.”

Phil says nothing, not exactly in a hurry to divulge more information than she’d asked for and he can’t help following her as she circles him, caught in her orbit like a planet rounding the sun.

“Curious,” she says again and though he can’t see her face behind the mask the lilt of her words makes it sound as if she’s smiling. “It’s often said a pretty face hides evil ways. We never know who people really are until it’s too late, so I wonder- are you what you appear to be or is your mask better concealed than mine?”

She makes another round of him, sizing him up, taking his measure and he’s careful to keep her in sight at all times, although he’s quickly becoming dizzy from their merry go round standoff.

“Tell me, who are you? Where are you from? What is your business here?”

The questions come right after another, relentless and quick and all at once it’s difficult to multitask paying attention to where he’s going while processing her question at the same time. His left foot snags on the heel of his right as he makes another turn and he jolts forward, only just managing to save himself from careening headlong to the floor. He quickly works to regain his balance, overtly aware of the woman circling him the entire time like a shark lazily biding its time to feed before taking an exploratory bite. If she managed to blindside him or if he chose not to reply he has an idea she just might opt for an impromptu taste test to satisfy her curiosity of him, picking up where Dan had left off with his arm and finishing the job for good. It’s not a happy thought and he’s not sure he can manage to keep up with her if she continues to pace around him in a way that’s beginning to give him the same queasy motion sickness he’d felt in the car without the benefit of a window to stick his hand though this time.

Thankfully, after another meandering circle, she comes to a halt in front of him and waits for an answer. With the room slowly revolving in his periphery as he tries to shake off the spell of lightheadedness fogging his brain, he struggles to find the best reply that won’t feed her suspicions of him. There’s a risk of unwittingly offering more information than he intended to his own disadvantage, but the questions are phrased simply enough with plenty of leeway for him to invent a story that will allow him to skirt around the truth without it being an outright lie she might sense before it left his mouth, but it’s a struggle to not mitigate the nervous tension of the moment with his usual fallback of humor and answer her first question with, ‘I am Groot.’  
Maybe it’s exhaustion, fear and the brink of hysteria making the idea sound funnier in his head than it actually is. He’d always advocated for being nothing less than himself in most social gatherings, but this didn’t exactly qualify as a casual meeting between friends or colleagues at Vidcon and even without the benefit of a vampire’s heightened senses he knows giving a flippant answer now, no matter how tongue in cheek or benign in nature, probably wouldn’t go over well with this woman at all. She’s watching him silently from behind that strange mask of hers with an unblinking, hungry stare and he thinks if there really was a time and place for humor maybe now, alone, in a basement in a house full of vampires with one currently analyzing his every move was probably not the best time or place to break out the lighter edge of his wit.

He fights back the urge to go with his first impulse answer, searches for the best answer he can give without revealing too much and says, “I- well, I was trying to find my friend. He arrived before me and while I was looking for him I ended up losing my way like I said and ended up down here. There’s so much stuff to look at I got turned around.”

He’s not sure if she buys it and he wishes he had a more convincing line to lead in on, some anodyne observation to break the tension- an obscure piece of trivia or a fun fact, even a pun to dispel the tension- anything to make the stiff smile on his face look more genuine than it feels.

_Except I don’t think a timely pun about vampires would really make this any better, but I mean, who knows? Maybe she’d appreciate a good pun. Can’t just judge people without knowing them. I’ve seen even the most stone faced people on the train break out a smile when they see a puppy stick its head out of a handbag._

He tries not to judge but the macabre mask on the woman’s face, although ornate and objectively beautiful despite its strange shape, doesn’t make it easy, especially considering the way the woman tilts her head at an oblique angle as he talks, as if parsing each word he says for invisible stores of information relaying more details than he was aware of.

Again, he’s uncomfortably aware of his nerves prickling at the tips of his fingers with a slight tremble he tries to hide by stuffing them into his jacket pockets. Better when he could affect confidence on a stage in front of a sizeable crowd of people when he had an idea of what he wanted to say and the kind of reception he wanted to achieve. Here however, acting natural seems more counter intuitive than helpful and ‘acting’ itself is a lesson in combatting high strung nerves to pull off an air of nonchalant confidence effectively. If Dan were here Phil could look to him to grant a sense of equilibrium. There was always a comment or a look he could work off of, a seamless back and forth of conversation in words and subtle signals that always made him feel comfortable and situated in himself, as if they both had always been on the same page in terms of thought and sentiment from the start, creating a seamless connection built on trust and the kind of intimate personability which came from all strong, enduring friendships. Even when around other people, Phil could usually rely on drawing on a point of commonality to help stave off awkward silences and discomfort by using a quirk of his own personality to surprise them into laughter or conversation, but the woman, with her rapt and silent demeanor, unnerves him beyond the point where he could rally his own strengths in Dan’s absence to handle the situation with anything approaching self-assurance.

“So, you’ve lost your friend and you’ve lost your way,” the woman says. “It’s interesting how we’re both down here trying to find things we’ve lost.”

“Oh, really? You too? Guess it must be that kind of night.”

“Or simply our bad luck.” The woman approaches yet another step closer and Phil involuntarily takes a half step back. “But you’ve only answered part of my question. I still don’t know who you are. What is your name?”

Susan’s anecdotal warning echoes back to him about revealing his name to strangers with hidden agendas and although he still thinks Susan’s reasons had been a bit eccentric he decides it best to take after her example and not reveal his real name, just in case the woman might know Dan or know him well enough to realize he also had a friend named Phil.

A string of aliases zip through Phil’s brain for consideration and pressured to fill the silence with an answer before she can grow more suspicious of the long pause, he nearly blurts out, “my name is Thor,” on a frantic impulse before settling on, “I’m Kyle.”

“Kyle? Such an American sounding name for an English sounding person like yourself. Are you secretly American perhaps? A so called expat living in London?”

Phil laughs nervously, remembering his last foray pretending to be American on the internet and the mixed reception it had received. “Oh, ha,ha- no. I visit the states occasionally on family vacations and for work, but England has always been home.”

“And yet you’ve never been farther away from anything resembling home than you are right now.”

“I-uh, yeah, it really does feel that way.” He’s not sure he especially likes the way she says it, nor how she begins slowly pacing around him again in a counter clockwise motion this time.

“You’re not especially forthcoming with your answers, but then I’m the same way in front of strangers I’ve only just met. Still, there are things we do not know about each other. We’re wary of what the other might be hiding. You could be a criminal for all I know. A _murderer_ , perhaps.” The mask looms forward in his face and Phil jerks his head back. “Maybe even an arsonist or a thief.”

“I’ve never killed anyone, although I do ‘kill it’ occasionally in Mario Kart.” He gives an emphatic eyebrow raise to show he’s joking, but it’s hard to tell behind her mask if the woman is smiling along with him or giving him a withering glare. As the silence draws itself out he hurriedly continues, “I mean I almost set fire to my foot once and I do “borrow” my flatmate’s cereal occasionally when I need a snack but I wouldn’t class either of those as arson or theft. Although, technically maybe the last one kind of is.”

“But what are you then? Rather, what do you do? What is your choice of career? Usually how a person chooses to spend their time is most telling of all.”

There it was. The Question. The one he usually struggled to answer when the other person might not be aware of what precisely a YouTuber was or what they did. It’s even harder to find an alternate way to explain his job just in case the woman already knew Dan shared the same profession. He’s not sure she’d take it as a sign of a lucky coincidence that they both made videos for a living. It would only make him look more suspect than he already did. But what could he say that might be convincing enough to ease her suspicions without completely lying?

“I’m a sort of…storyteller.” He fumbles for the words and they tumble out quickly before he can give them much thought.

“A storyteller?” Her head tilts inquisitively to the left, giving her the mien of a large bird quirking its head to get a better look at him. “Like the Ozans of old? A type of bard in other words?”

“Not really. I guess you could say it’s something like what bards do, except I don’t put any of my stories to song. It’s mostly just me talking about my life, all my adventures, mishaps and creative ideas, in a funny, lighthearted way.”

“Oh, so a type of comedian then. I do enjoy a good laugh. Comedy clubs are one of my favorite places to visit apart from flower shops. Go on, tell me a joke.”

“I –um, it’s not exactly like that, I don’t really- Oh!” Just as his words threaten to tangle together in his mouth one particular joke suddenly pops into his head and Phil brightens up. “Here’s a good one. Ready? My dog, Minton, ate three shuttlecocks last night and you know what I said to him?”

He raises his eyebrows and pauses for effect.

“ _Bad Minton!_ ”

A long, heavy silence falls.

The woman stares at him. He stares back. No one says anything.

Phil keeps his eyebrows raised expectantly, willing her to get it, but as the silence draws itself out without a reaction his hopeful optimism begins to wilt. Then, just when he thinks he can hear a chorus of crickets reaching a fever pitch crescendo in his head, the woman claps her hands together in delight.

“How clever! Yes, I see now. It is a type of pun, a play of words about the game badminton. Very good. Tell me another.”

Phil nervously laughs, not sure he can take the stress of another delayed reaction or no reaction at all. “I think that’s all I have for tonight. Those aren’t the types of jokes I mean anyway. What I do is more like situational comedy.”

“Ah. Like one would sit down to speak about a moment of their day to a friend, to exchange banter as the kids say these days. I understand. Strange to think one could make a career out of such a thing, but I suppose the performance must pay good dividends else you’d be doing something else.”

“I don’t know. I think I’d always be doing the same thing in a slightly different way. I always wanted to be a film director for example, even if what I do it a bit close to that already.”

“So you are a type of creator, then. In that you create a version of the world or the way you see and experience the world, and tell stories around it.” Her head tilts the opposite way to scrutinize him from a different angle and Phil wonders if he’s said too much already.

_Maybe I should have stuck with the puns after all…_

 “And when you tell these lighthearted stories, is your audience satisfied with your handsome face and clever thoughts alone? They don’t want more emotion than the same funny anecdotes you provide? They don’t want to know more like I do?”

“More about what?”

“Why, all the sadness, pain and fear which goes into distinguishing a person from a two dimensional sketch. All the raw emotion of doubt that reassures the audience that their idols can bleed the same as they do; that they’re well intentioned, well informed, vulnerable, flawed and utterly human like them. Even comedians are hard pressed to lace their routine with the authenticity of misery to give their punchlines more depth and relevance. Blissful anecdotes can only satisfy curiosity for so long. Do you not feel pressured to be more authentic?”

“Only when I need to follow a recipe to make pancakes.”

At the small lull which threatens to become a larger pocket of silence to rival the one from before, Phil hurriedly thinks of something else to say.

“I mean no, not really. I’ve never thought authenticity was about wearing your heart on your sleeve all the time anyway. I’ve always gravitated towards things that make me laugh and make me interested or happy so I reflect that in what I do. I just like exemplifying the traits I enjoy the most even if I don’t always embody it twenty four hours a day and even then it’s not far off from who I really am at heart. I don’t need to bare my soul in front of strangers to let them know I have a more complex internal life than the stories I tell. Why do I have to ‘bleed’ in front of people for them to realize I’m capable of being hurt just like them? I don’t have to share every detail about myself. I’m not comfortable with that. It’s not me.” He shrugs.

“You stay true to yourself then despite external pressures. Yes, I see.” The woman continues pacing and he wonders if he’s just too dizzy to see properly or if she’s steadily growing closer with each new meandering circuit around him. “What I fail to understand is what a storyteller is doing in this house to begin with. Humans are either invited or come of their own volition and in both cases it’s always because they’re looking for a promise of something better in their lives. Is that the real reason you’re here tonight? You’re looking for power, more renown and influence than your profession currently affords you? Because if so, we have a plentiful amount of it. It’s not uncommon for humans to want a bit for themselves.”

“No, like I said, I’m only here to find my friend. Then I just want to go home.”

 He doesn’t think the distance closing between them is an illusion anymore. She’s growing closer, millimeter by millimeter, at a rate so slow and subtle he might barely notice it otherwise, but he does and he worries what she means to do once she reaches him.

“I know what it’s like to work in theatre,” the woman says. “I know the demands of a public profession. Sometimes telling stories and playing games isn’t enough. You don’t worry about your uncertain longevity? All the passing years weighing down to make you older and slower with time? You don’t want the promise of eternity to freeze your youth, to make you more confident and capable than you are now? To be more than a storyteller, more than someone who will age and whose stories will age with him making them less interesting to the proceeding generations of youth who will look for better stories reflected by people their own age?”

He shrugs again, this time out of an uncomfortable reflex. It’s the same question he’d faced with Dan. One that had haunted him throughout primary and secondary with remarks from teachers on report cards worrying about his habit of daydreaming about other worlds in lieu of focusing on his work or his penchant for immersing himself in fantasy television shows until they became the focal point of every conversation. What will become of the boy, their comments seemed to imply, how long could he continue to balance one foot in reality and the other in every alternate universe he imagined for himself without eventually crashing and burning along the way? Stories and daydreams aren’t sustainable, they further implied. One could enjoy the reprieve of frittering away the hours with one’s head in the clouds for a while, but not forever. Certainly not as an adult. He’d proved them wrong in his own way of course. He didn’t need to belabor the point of how far he’d come by virtue of his own unfettered imagination. The boy who’d once filmed a horror movie in the open fields and backyards of his old neighborhood had grown by leaps and bounds, but that youthful energy and creativity stayed with him. He would always walk in two universes, forever divided into the Phil who saw the world as it was and the Phil who saw the world in all the ways it could only exist in his head. No amount of concerned report cards, comments from strangers or the passage of time could ever change that part of who he was. But the promise of immortality, of eternal youth and untold strength remained tempting. Who wouldn’t want to take advantage of an opportunity like that when time itself was limited? It wasn’t as if the question hadn’t run through his mind before he knew things like vampires existed. If he had been on his own, if he had never met Dan, if his stories and career were not as successful as they were and he floundered to find a place in a world that wasn’t always so welcoming to dreamers like him, would he have eventually found his way to this house on his own to look for the promise of something else, something different and otherworldly to match how different and otherworldly he sometimes felt? One day he might accept Dan’s offer. In a way he thinks he already had, but Dan was the exception to the rule as he’d always been from the start, the one person he would even think to brave facing the idea of immortality with, no matter if it came with fangs and blood. But it was only with Dan he’d ever consider the idea, not with whatever vampires loved in this house, creatures whom, if Jorin’s and Teague’s stories were to be believed, would sooner destroy him on sight than make him one of them. They shared none of the innate kindness Dan had and he thinks he’d rather live the rest of his days as the finite human dreamer and storyteller than fall victim to their cruelty. He only hopes Dan hasn’t fallen victim to it already.

“I think I’ve been doing okay so far,” he answers the woman. “I’m not looking for anything else at the moment. You said I was a creator and if that’s true, then I’m quite happy with the world I’ve created for myself.”

He thinks of Dan and quietly amends to himself, _I’m happy with the world we’ve created together._

“Interesting,” she says. “Your answers still don’t provide much to work with, but what you’ve said already make a good composite sketch for me to ‘get the picture’ as the saying goes.”

Phil swallows hard and keeps pace with her as she goes on to assess him.

“So then…your name is Kyle. You’re not American and you’re not a brunette either if those ginger roots showing through are any indication.”

“It’s not really ginger, actually. Somewhat of a blondish brown, maybe a light auburn-” He meekly tries to correct her but she continues talking and he gives up the attempt while making a mental note to touch up his hair the next time he had a chance.

 “You’re not criminally inclined but you freely profess to be marginally clumsy, which makes you somewhat humble; willing to be self-deprecating in front of strangers instead of pompous and arrogant. You err on the side of humor although you clearly fear me and you fear not being able to find your friend in time. The way you continue to stand in front of me despite your misgivings, determined to find this friend no matter what I might do to you, is telling of your character. Just as telling as your having a flatmate whom you’re comfortable enough to share proximity and possessions with, or “borrow” it occasionally, as you say, which could either be a mark of loyalty and trust between you or of egotism and carelessness on your part, but I don’t think that’s your style. Is it?”

Her description of him is just as relentless as her questions had been and all he can do in the face of it is quickly shake his head.

“No, I thought not. Instead I see someone smart and kind, someone fiercely motivated, inventive and brave, a bright light unto himself even when in the midst of dark circumstances. You take pains to adjust your appearance and intentions according to who you envision yourself to be instead of what others want you to be. Yet, you make no illusions about your own flaws without flaunting them out of self-pity, preferring to protect the most intimate aspects of your life, to afford yourself privacy, although your career may invite the opposite. You are someone determined to find his way despite not knowing how or where the path may lead or what risks might present themselves. No matter how fearful or unsure of yourself you may be, you persevere, for the sake of your goals and for the sake of those who are important to you- epitomizing the phrase, fortune favors the bold.”

He’s not sure what to say to that kind of glowing endorsement. Her assessment of him reads like an answer in a viewer generated quiz of himself, listing candid observations and summarizing them into profound, flattering statements about who he was in ways he’d never considered before.

 _I saw a quiz once that had a title something like, ‘Which AmazingPhil Body Part Are You,’_ he thinks. _Wonder what part of me would get that answer about me embodying the phrase ‘fortune favors the bold.’ My left elbow? My knees? Maybe my eyes? They do have bold coloring even if I don’t always feel fortunate when a contact falls out of one. Could also be my eyebrows though. They’ve got kind of a bold shape and I’m fortunate never to have had to style them once in my entire life. Then again, it could also be my ear-_

The woman clears her throat pointedly, startling him from his train of thought.

“Er- sorry.” He gives a wincing smile. “That’s very nice of you to say. You really see all that?”

“And more. Intuition has never led me wrong. Then, of course, I’ve had countless years of experience learning how to read someone’s personality. I’ve encountered intriguing people in the least likely of places. Sometimes a bus stop, a book store or even a flower shop, and now here, in this basement, during a chance encounter on a stormy evening. Life is funny that way. Don’t you think?”

 Phil doesn’t have time to answer, too alarmed by how she’s steadily advancing closer than before with each new circle around him.

 “It’s also funny how despite your brave front and carefully tailored responses I know you’re hiding something. I smell it on you. Your heartbeat rats you out. Such a skittish thing the way it goes-tickticktickticktick.” She flicks her pointer finger in time to a frenzied beat only she can hear. “What hidden agenda does this human have I wonder? What little secret does it keep? What does it have in its pockets?”

The weirdly phrased question makes him think of Gollum, of precious things and more precious rings and it’s then he suddenly remembers the ornate silver ring he’d found earlier in the culvert. The woman steps closer, now only a few inches away. He can see each minute crack in the paint on her mask and the way her eyes seem to have no color at all except for a deep and penetrating shade of black. She smells of rain and ozone and of something else, something more metallic and sharp, like pennies gripped in a sweaty palm.

 _Like blood_ , he thinks.

She tilts her head up and he sees her mouth revealed clearly below the bottom half of the mask, sees her lips part to reveal her fangs, such sharp, white lethal fangs and immediately, on a frantic reflex he can’t explain, his hand clenches around the ring in his jacket pocket. The sharp edges of the stone settings bite deep into his palm and without another thought he takes it out and shoves it at her like a shield.

“ _Here!_ ” He all but bellows the word at her. He has no idea how this should help or why she should care, but suddenly, the woman halts. Her mouth closes, sealing her fangs back behind her lips and she trains her dark stare on the ring lying in his open palm.

“Well, aren’t you full of surprises,” she murmurs. “That’s mine. That’s what I’ve lost.”

“Really? Isn’t that lucky.” His mouth is desert dry and he can’t help his voice cracking a bit as he speaks.

“Lucky for both of us.” She plucks the ring between her fingers and holds it up to the dim light in the room. “It’s such an old thing really. The way it keeps falling off my hand you’d think I’d have sold it off by now, but some things are too important to leave behind. I expect you understand what I mean.” The woman slides the ring back onto her finger and from Phil’s perspective it looks like a snug, perfect fit. “How refreshing to encounter someone not only brave but honest as well. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank you for returning my possession when you could have chosen to keep it for yourself. Please, allow me to repay you.”

It’s strange how it’s suddenly difficult to look at her directly as if she were an amorphous blob of shifting darkness moving across the floor and dimly, like an afterthought, he registers the fact that he can’t hear her footsteps at all. He blinks hard and looks again and she’s closer than before, more ominous and vaguely defined like a blanket of fog. It reminds him of the observer effect, a theory he remembered learning in physics class describing how merely the act of observation could change the thing or phenomenon being observed. He’s sure there must be more to it than that but he’s too preoccupied by the vampire, stalking closer to him to focus on correcting himself. But if it was true that things had the power to change their appearance based on the reactions and suggestions of his mind, like a beam of light refracting through water, he half wonders if the woman might continue to warp into various shapes to be at once a vampire, then a dragon then something like a prehistoric bird or a large magpie like the one engraved in her ring, an otherworldly evolution with prehensile claws and serrated teeth- a creature of limitless forms as boundless and varied as his own imagination. It’s an interesting thought and a terrifying one at the same time. If she wasn’t strictly rooted in reality or if she could shift reality with her hypnotizing gaze alone to trick his perceptions, in effect she was confined by nothing to make her into anything. She could be whatever he feared she might become, something possessed of terrible power that no matter the shape was as unpredictable and indefinable as death itself.

_Kind of liked it better when I just thought she was a catgon._

She reaches out with her cold hand and Phil has a flashback to Ashton crowding him against the rain slick wall of the alley, reaching out to bend his neck back for a better angle at which to bite and Phil backpedals quickly away. He doesn’t get very far when the back of his legs run straight into the small table with the pink hippo statue he’d been admiring before. The woman continues her slow stalking approach, but at the last second, just before Phil can decide whether to start yelling bloody murder or to brandish the table over his head like a melee weapon, she veers away and steps behind him.

“Would you mind moving over a bit? I need to get something.”

“S-sure.”

Mystified, he quickly sidesteps out of the way and watches over his shoulder as the woman bends down to pull open a small drawer in the table. In the same fluid motion she reaches in to grab what looks like a pack of cards; then she straightens up and swiftly pushes the drawer closed. As she steps away it becomes easier to look at her. She no longer resembles a nightmarish glitch of conflicting shapes, but Phil is too captivated by the cards she begins to toy with like a stage magician warming up for a grand act to pay any attention to her. They flicker and sift between her hands in a blur of complicated shuffles. Up and down, back and forth, overhand and under. It’s a mesmerizing dance and he watches it all in open fascination, his fear of her temporarily forgotten. It distantly occurs to him maybe that was the point of the whole show, a convenient distraction to soothe his racing pulse back to a state of calm. If so, he’s not complaining, especially not when it’s working. As a finishing touch, the cards accordion out between her palms in a trail at least a foot long, at a rate too fast for them to succumb to gravity and fall to the floor, before settling back in the palm of her right hand as neatly as a magnet to metal.

“Do you play, Kyle?” The woman holds up the pack like a paper fan with the suits facing her.

At first he has no idea who she’s talking to. His mind is still occupied with trying to understand how she’d pulled off those shuffles with such ease and so it takes a moment for Phil to remember that ‘Kyle’ is supposed to be his alias.

“Oh. Right.” He shakes his head quickly. “I’ve dabbled in a few games before, but I’m not really what you’d call a card shark.”

“That’s alright. What I really mean to ask is, do you _read_ cards?”

“Sorry?”

“No apologies needed. I asked if you read the cards, the way some people read tea leaves or the patterns of stars or the arrangement of viscera in a disemboweled carcass.”

Phil makes a face at the last one. “People…do that?”

“Occasionally. It was more common centuries ago, but not so much now, so don’t worry. No one will be divining your future with your entrails any time soon, although if they did, by that point there wouldn’t be much of a future left for anyone to read, hm?”

Not sure how to respond and too uncomfortable to try, Phil gives another nervous laugh.

“So then, cards? Do you read them?” She gives the pack a little wave.

“Sort of. I have a set, but I mostly use them out of curiosity and entertainment.”

“You surprise me more than once tonight. Most people view it in a purely skeptical light. It’s a controversial art, but I’ve also found it can be an incredibly accurate one as well. How would you feel if I read them for you, to grant you a sense of direction, of where you need to go and what to expect, as a means of helping you find your friend?”

He pauses before answering and she laughs, not unkindly. “Do you not believe in it then?”

Phil wonders, did he? He knows he wanted to believe in it. He liked the possibility of something like magic existing in their plane of reality just under the surface of what they could see. So many cultures and religions around the world exchanged stories centered on the evidence of the supernatural and the otherworldly. There were even chains of stores dedicated to the sale of esoteric items to be used for spells and invocations, catering to the type of clientele who swore by the use of jasmine oil to attract protection, love and positive energies or who used white quartz to balance and cleanse spiritual auras. In the face of so many testimonials and given his own family’s experiences with ghosts, he often wondered if maybe there wasn’t something more to it all than just fanciful stories. Some of his friends had already jokingly called him ‘psychic’ whenever he happened to rightly predict the weather or whenever he commented about a dream which had later come true. Maybe there weren’t such things as unicorns and dragons, cat like or otherwise, and maybe he would never command elemental energies with a wave of his hand like Willow Rosenberg, but the idea still intrigued him. He’d never related more strongly to the X-files slogan, “I want to believe.” Because he did, even if a tiny corner of his mind argued against it. He remembered asking Dan about his thoughts on the matter years ago, on one quiet summer afternoon as he’d toyed with a set of tarot cards, sat on his bed in his old family home while Dan had idly rolled himself back and forth across the floor in a wheeled office chair, the both of them enjoying having nothing in particular to do except bask in each other’s company between occasional gripes of failed Crash Bandicoot sessions.

“Do you believe in stuff like the tarot?” The question had slipped out casually, without preamble, and Phil remembers exactly how Dan had looked after hearing it, raising his eyebrows in a familiar long-suffering expression made of equal parts fond patience and exasperated disbelief, before answering with a firm, decided, “No _._ ”

“You can’t just allow for the possibility, even a little bit?”

“It’d be a bit cruel if it _was_ real, Phil.”

“Wha- cruel? Why do you say that?”

“Because life deals bad hands and good ones all the time in no particular order or rhyme or reason and having a fancy stationary set arbitrarily choose which turn of life’s hectic roulette wheel I get to enjoy this time round doesn’t mean anything. If all we needed was a set of cards to tell us what to look out for no one would ever be hurt or killed; we’d all know our life purposes and we’d find all the things we needed to be happy and successful without having to struggle figuring it out as we went along at the risk of never finding the answers at all. The universe doesn’t work that way. It’s just randomly generated probabilities of chance that are interesting when they coincide with something personally meaningful to one particular person, but that’s all it is, us giving meaning to things that would otherwise have no meaning at all. I mean, what if I get a bad tarot reading and I’m so afraid of it coming true I make it happen unconsciously when it might not have happened at all? On the other hand, what if the cards say I’ll be successful and I believe it so much I stop making any effort towards my goal and fail because it felt like victory was ensured all along when of course it wasn’t? What if I stop having confidence in any of my decisions because I’m too obsessed with asking the cards about every little detail until I’m asking them if it’s alright to step foot out the door to buy milk? Which, granted, if I had a choice I’d rather not and with home delivery people don’t have much to worry about either way, but still… If all we needed was a pack of cards to figure ourselves out, things would be so much easier and if it is true and we’ve been suffering needlessly all this time when the answers were at our fingertips all along, then it’s like some kind of cosmic, cruel joke. And even if life is a joke to begin with, that would be the worst one of all. It’s a coincidence, Phil, and it can be inspirational and entertaining and whatever, but it’s just coincidence and relying on coincidence to forecast your life isn’t the way I want to live my life.”

Phil remembers casting his eyes down and pursing his lips in a sulky moue. “Okay, okay, fine. I get it. You don’t believe in the magic.”

“Only in Harry Potter books and Lord of the Rings where I can pretend I’d know what I was doing if I existed in those universes with all the skills I’d need to survive, especially in a place where the magic there can kill you if you fuck up even slightly. Look- I’m not trying to be difficult and it’s not like I don’t wish I could, but you can’t expect me to say I believe when I don’t. I can’t.”

“But….it’s kind of boring though, isn’t it? You don’t think some things might be more than coincidence? You don’t think…maybe there’s something more special and incredible at work than random chance?” Phil had asked it softly, quietly desperate for Dan to comprehend what he meant and Dan had sighed, wheeling his chair to a halt in front of the bed. He hadn’t looked exasperated or fed up anymore, only wistfully fond, as if he dearly wanted to agree with Phil past all his reasoning grounded in more rational philosophies and schools of science that could never allow for the existence of the occult.

“I think it all depends on someone’s perspective and I’ll always respect yours- tarot cards, magic and all- even though I might never completely agree and as long as you don’t try to enchant me into a toad.” Dan had smiled and as Phil had perked up the smile had grown larger.

“Let me do a reading for you then.”

“I’ll pass.” Dan had wheeled his chair away from the bed as Phil had bounded to the edge of it, excitedly brandishing the pack of cards in his hands.

“Come on. What happened to respecting my perspective? You can’t just play along? …for me?”

“Oh, fine, whatever.” Dan had rolled his eyes, but the smile had remained on his face. “Go ahead.”

Phil had immediately handed over the cards for Dan to shuffle, eager to see what kind of reading he would get.  “Later, we can do this Western Australian technique I heard about once using a banana peel.”

“Now I know you’re shitting me.”

“I’m serious!” Phil had laughed and only barely managed to keep the smirk off his face. “It’s a long standing practice in Australia that goes back many years. A lot of people swear by it.”

“I’m going to be swearing at you in a second if you start divining my future with fruit rinds.” Dan had begun idly tossing pen caps and small plushies at Phil’s head to express his displeasure.

“Okay, okay!” Phil had waved off the assault with a broad grin. “We can leave the banana peel reading for another time.”

“Or never.”

Phil couldn’t remember the cards drawn that day, but Dan’s words had stayed with him. Maybe, in the end, tarot cards really were nothing but strings of coincidence neatly explained away by humanity’s habit to give order to the random and the inexplicable, however, at the same time, it’s difficult for him to profess total disbelief and he wonders if the woman’s offer might actually help him to figure out what to do next in order to find Dan. If the outcome was fifty/fifty for coincidence or truth, then, in the absence of all other options, what could it hurt to take the chance? Teague was still missing and as the woman hadn’t decided to make a blood cocktail out of him yet, Phil thinks maybe accepting her offer of assistance no matter how strange was the best option available.

“Would you rather not have a reading then?”

Phil startles back to himself and shakes his head quickly before the woman decided to change her mind. “No, no, I mean yes, I would. I’d like the reading. Please.”

“Very well.” She hands the deck to him and he reaches out to take it. “Shuffle them for as long as you feel appropriate and when you’re ready, stop.”

The cards feel cold in his palm as if they’d absorbed the chill of the woman’s fingers and were now transmitting it back to him like an ice pack. They also feel heavier than his deck at home, stiff and weighted like laminated placards. The edges are creased and dog eared from constant use and the sides faintly yellowed with age. Brief snippets of images flash by as he riffles through them. He sees wands, swords, cups and pentacles, all the traditional suits which came standard for most tarot decks he’d seen. He’d never practiced long enough to have a complete understanding of what each image and suit was supposed to symbolize, but he only hopes that whatever he picked out didn’t end up portending anything too ominous. Ghostly voices in tunnels and strange vampires in masquerade costumes were enough by way of ominous events to last him a good while. He tries to hurry up, mindful of the seconds trickling by as he stands there, but it’s difficult to shuffle the cards with the same speed and finesse the woman had shown. He has no idea how she’d pulled off half the shuffling techniques from before when the cards feel so inflexible and rigid between his hands. Despite his trouble, he’s dearly tempted to try her ‘accordion trick’ but then worries he might end up spraying them across the room instead. In the end he opts to stick with his methodical approach and presently, on his fourth shuffle, he decides it’s time to hand them over again.

“Good,” The woman says. “Let’s see what we have. Pull out the first four cards of the deck and lay them face down on the table in order.”

Phil complies, choosing four cards and setting them alongside each other next to the pink quartz hippo statue on the tabletop. The woman leans forward and turns over each card in turn. She makes a low humming noise in her throat as she does like a doctor making private conclusions to themselves while poring over the results of a medical scan. Phil peers over her shoulder and at a glance all the cards look benign and inconspicuous except the last one. It stands out from the rest straight way with its depiction of a high castle tower struck by lightning. The top of its pointed roof is on fire. Sparks and flames spread through each floor and two people inside attempt escaping the blaze by jumping out of two windows in the middle while the sky hurls more sparks and bolts of lightning all around them. It’s not a particularly happy scene and Phil’s not sure he wants to hear the accompanying interpretation.

_Why can’t there be tarot card with puppies? Just happy, playful puppies rolling around in the grass having a good time, chasing squeaky toys and enjoying life. If I ever designed my own set there would definitely be a puppy card. Maybe one with pandas as well for good measure._

“Interesting,” the woman says after a time. “Everything here is major arcana. Not that I expected any less with you, but it’s interesting all the same. Look at the first card. It’s meant to represent you or who you are now at the present time. How fitting it should be Strength.”

She taps the front of a card depicting a girl in a long voluminous white gown bending over the head of a lion she appears to be subduing with one hand on its mane and the other prying its jaws apart, but she does so calmly, without any visible signs of aggression or physical exertion. The lion itself doesn’t look put out by the treatment and merely stands in place, tolerating the girl’s touch without fighting back although its formidable size and bared fangs suggests it easily could

“This represents someone of great fortitude who relies on compassion, wit and determination to achieve their goals. This is someone who doesn’t need brute strength but inner strength to survive. You focus on what you want, on what you need and you work to make it so without violence or aggression. You don’t need these things. You never have. You never will. No one has dominion over you, except for you. Remember that. The lion is tamed through levelheaded thought; through empathy, effort and confidence. As it is with all things in life as well.”

“So er-if this is supposed to be me,” Phil begins hesitantly. “It doesn’t matter the person on the card is a girl then?”

The woman laughs. “No. The illustrations exist as symbolic guidelines towards their interpretations rather than literal depictions of the people whose readings they’re drawn for. In some instances however they can be more literal than figurative as might be the case with this next card. See her, the High Priestess.”

Phil looks as she points to the next card with an illustration of a regally clothed woman sat on a throne. Her expression is hard to read, it’s both imperious and enigmatic and he can’t tell if she’s glowering at him or smiling.

“This is card is placed in the second position of your reading which is meant to represent a person or situation you may soon encounter or already have. The High Priestess is a person of authority, wisdom and mysterious renown who guards the way forward with something you may need. She does not offer help however, she barters in secrets alone, some of which you will never know and others you will need to figure out to reveal the answer.”

Phil opens his mouth to ask a question, to see if the card was meant to represent her and if that was one of the secrets she meant to imply, but before he can take a breath to get one word out the woman swiftly moves on to the third card.

“Here we have the Moon, in the position meant to represent upcoming obstacles along with advice which may help you overcome it.”

True to its name, the third card depicts a moon hanging in a starry sky, but its crescent shape has been drawn with the face of a grinning skull covered in thorned roses. It hovers above a pool of water around which two animals, a pair of foxes or wild dogs, Phil can’t tell what they are, seem to bay up at the moon with their mouths pulled back in a fixed snarl.

_Wonder what they’re supposed to mean. Why do they look so upset? Indigestion? Bad case of fleas? Or maybe they just really don’t like the moon? Though, I wouldn’t like it either, if I’m honest. I think even NASA would nope out of exploring space if something like that appeared in the sky._

Phil can’t help staring at the cadaverous profile. As a child, he’d once owned a set of bed linens covered in patterns of suns and moons with unsettling hyper realistic faces. He’d never understood why his parents had decided to buy the equivalent of nightmare fuel for him to sleep with at night, but the death’s head illustration in front of him is more disturbing by far. Something about its arcane and morbid design reminds him of the woman’s mask. More specifically it reminds him of how she had hypnotized him into seeing the mask warp into a blur of unsettling forms not unlike the moon in the tarot card. The comparison makes him uneasy and he shudders.

“It looks creepy,” he says.

“I suppose it does look creepy, yes, but with good reason. It’s meant to signify a warning for you to have caution in the face of imminent illusions. Someone may toy with your beliefs; play tricks with your mind. It’s very easy to lose more than one’s way in this house, Kyle. It’s quite easier in fact to lose one’s sense of self. This card reminds you to have a care. Your thoughts are responsible for the reality you create for yourself. What you most believe to be true will manifest itself as a physical affirmation of everything you think you deserve, for better or for worse.”

“So, say if I wanted to be the ruler of the universe, if I concentrated hard enough, does that mean it’ll happen,” Phil asks.

“Perhaps not in the way you mean, else as the saying goes, if wishes were horses…”

 _We’d be living in a terrifying world_ , Phil thinks.

“However,” the woman continues, “if you wanted to adopt the mien and confidence of a ruler, one of your own imagining, whether he is lighthearted and wise or domineering and cruel in action and speech, then yes, in a manner of speaking you could be. All reality is shaped by how one approaches it. Your best thoughts and your worst fears will always influence your future, as can the thoughts and fears of other people. Yet, regardless of what others might say to unduly influence or deceive you, despite every negative perception of self that may rise up from your own mind to hinder you, you can triumph over it all. It will not be easy of course, nothing is ever as simple as we wish it to be, least of all when it comes to our own minds, but belief is one crucial step along the path of achieving anything or creating your own way in this world. As a creator yourself, you already have the skills necessary to succeed in this endeavor. Remember that.”

 Before he can think of anything to say to this onslaught of information or to numbly react with a small nod, she moves right along with her analysis. “Look here now, a wolf and a dog together under the moon, two sides of one coin, similar yet different. Animal natures will be revealed to you. Some may help, others will deceive and yet others will attempt to consume you. It will be important for you to resist, to not give into fear and to not allow your mind to be clouded with doubt. If you hesitate, if you doubt yourself even for a moment, all is lost. Do you understand?”

“I-I think so.”

“Good. You don’t have time not to.” With that unsettling statement, the woman moves on to the last card he’d been dreading since first glimpsing it.

“And now…we have the Tower, placed to represent the most likely outcome of future events. It’s a momentous card predicting sudden upheavals with memorable and lasting effects. Such confusion and crisis here- everything is happening at once, there is no time for forethought, only action. For some, the results of these actions will mean the end of an era; for others it will usher in a new beginning. See here, two people escaping the blaze of the collapsing tower. It is possible to avoid disaster, to turn it into fortune instead, like alchemy once claimed to turn lead into gold, but as with all chemical processes arcane or otherwise, as all things have a cause and effect, even if you manage to escape calamity that doesn’t mean you will be unaffected by it. Many things will change, many things will happen, and you must be prepared to meet it all head on. Your actions tonight will be pivotal. Your words even more so. Embrace your strengths, remember yourself, prepare to both encounter change and be its herald.”

The woman turns back to him and he’s lost for any better reply to her predictions than to say, “Wow, that’s intense.”

“But did it help?”

“In a way, I guess, but not really in helping me find Da- er, my friend.”

“Hmm, true. Most readings tend to be cryptic until hindsight provides them better clarity and even so, the specifics are always lost in translation. Allow me then to offer a word of advice to guide you on your way.” The mask inclines forward and the eyes peer at him from beneath the darkness, lambent and wide. “Once upstairs, you will find the way forward in Cassandra’s Gallery. Be warned however, things are not always what they appear. Though you may think there is no door there is.”

“That’s still a bit cryptic you know,” Phil says.

“Mind the lion. It bites.”

“That’s…not much better.”

“No? Well then, I suppose we’re both terrible at speaking plainly, you most especially, considering you aren’t a guest of the party upstairs at all are you? Nor are you merely here to look for a friend. Rather, you’re an unknown arrival, a resourceful intruder, one looking for a way out of here to find a way in, to find the boy, the roommate you call a friend, the one named Dan.”

Phil stares at her and it feels as if someone had just injected ice into his veins. After all his careful evasion he’d been caught out after all. “Hold on. I never said-how did you-?”

The woman folds her hands in front of her and despite the mask covering her face, Phil thinks she’s never looked more the part of the enigmatic High Priestess in the tarot card. “I told you, my intuition has never led me wrong. It’s not difficult for me to read people or the secrets they keep even when they try to conceal their true purpose or their true names.”

 Phil winces and takes a slow half step back away from her, but the woman casually waves away his alarm and continues. “If I wanted to hurt you, you would have known about it by now. In fact, I knew why you were here from the start. It’s not every night the Court decides to entertain the presence of a new blood, least of all a new blood of Dan’s reputation, but I never thought a human would risk their own life to get him back. I’ve watched your progress with interest and wanted to test you, to see if you were as dedicated to your purpose as you claimed to be and you were. You demonstrated genuine courage and you resisted temptation despite being alone and defenseless in the face of danger. Consider me impressed.”

“Hypothetically,” Phil asks slowly. “If I’d said I was interested in the offer, if I said I wanted it… would you have…turned me?”

“No, I’d have killed you.”

She says it amiably with a small shrug of her left shoulder and the best he can manage is a small, “oh…” in reply.

“You’re both something else, aren’t you? Dan has quite the strong soul on par with your own. He’s something like a warrior, fierce, impulsive yet warm and kind. He has quite the heart as well. It beats with the pulse of a survivor, one who struggles to live for himself and for those he loves above all others.”

“Intuition told you all that too?”

“I suppose you could say he just has that kind of flavor.”

Phil is sure if he could see her face right now she would be smirking.

“There are some people who have no earthly comparison to anyone else, people whose names become singular and unforgettable. I think in time that will be your fate, to be remembered through the ages as unlikely, unique personages of great acclaim and perhaps of great power as well.”

“I don’t know about great power,” Phil says. “But I could use a little more strength and courage right now.”

“I think you’ll soon find you have both in great measure already.”

“If you know why I’m here,” he begins hesitantly.

“Why am I helping you?” The woman gathers the cards up from the table and with one quick shuffle reintegrates them back into the pack. “I’m not. I don’t help. I instigate. Teague could tell you all about it.”

“Teague? How do you-“ He trails off and shakes his head. If she’d already figured out who he was there was really no purpose in asking how she’d figured out the rest. “Why would Teague know to tell me about you?”

“We have a history him and me. Bad blood, more like. He was something like a child to me once, but I think he’d despise the comparison and I’ve never been the maternal type myself. Ah, poor Teague...” She shakes her head. “He keeps far more secrets than I do and harbors deeper grudges, but not without good reason.”

Phil stares at her, nonplussed, unable to follow along with what she means.

“It’s not important now. You need to be on your way and soon. Time is not your friend. Nor is it mine. Despite my fancy dress, I don’t belong here. The Court and I have never been on friendly terms and if they know I’m here things are likely to become more complicated than they already are. I’ve played the part long enough, but the curtain now falls on my act and rises on yours. Listen!”  
She raises one finger in the air to draw his attention to the sounds going on around them. “I hear footsteps in the hall, just outside this room. We’re not the only ones down here it seems and whoever that is I don’t think they’ll be inclined to read your future, do you?”

On cue, Phil hears the far off echo of footsteps ringing across the stone floor at a brisk pace, growing stronger and closer with every step. They sound like the snapping click of a pair of dress shoes, not the duller tread of a pair of trainers like Teague had been wearing which meant whoever it was, it wasn’t Teague and as the woman had pointed out, it most likely wasn’t another vampire approaching with an offer to divine his future with a crystal ball this time. As far as Phil knew there was only one way out of this room and it occurs to him, despite the menagerie of hiding places to be found behind the large statues, snaking network of pipes, bulks of furniture and one enormous marble funerary slab behind him, he won’t have time to hide before whoever that was turned the corner to find him. Not that he thinks he could successfully hide anyway, not when a vampire could easily sense his presence in an instant. Dread slowly winds its way into his heart and kick starts his pulse back to overdrive.

“Just so you know. You’ll need my name when you get to the gallery.”

“Name?” Phil says it distractedly, not registering how strangely far off the woman’s voice suddenly sounds, his head turned towards the door, fearfully awaiting the arrival of the owner of the footsteps growing closer.

“Yes. My name. I never told you.” Her voice seeps into an echo of a whisper. “It’s Yilmaz.”

Shock knocks the wind out of him and his skin abruptly goes frigid with goose bumps. He whirls back to face her, but the woman, the vampire, Yilmaz, is already gone.

 

☾❧☽

 

It’s too much to process all at once. He’s alone in the cluttered environs of a sprawling basement in a house full of vampires and he’d just survived an encounter with the most unpredictable and ancient of them all, the same vampire Teague and Dan had told him about, a vampire he’d just received a tarot reading from, only to have her abruptly disappear into thin air within seconds of turning around just as if she were made out of nothing but fog and mist like he’d thought before. He glances down and for the first time notices a trail of footsteps like his own staining the floor in similar dark clots of mud _._

 _So not the fog monster from Lost then. Good to know_ , he thinks faintly.

From the individual toe prints stenciled into the grime it’s then he realizes that not only had she been barefoot, explaining why he had never heard her enter or leave, but apparently she had also been in the culvert with him, traveling through the same murky tunnel, probably watching him and Teague from the moment they’d stepped foot inside.

_What if she was the noise we heard? Or what if she was that voice chasing me through the tunnel? Teague said he heard someone. It could have been her all along. Oh god…what if she’s hurt Teague and that’s why he hasn’t caught up with me yet? But if she did, why would she lead me here only to have a chat and then let me leave? And why would she talk about Teague as if she were his parent? And what did she mean about him keeping more secrets and grudges than her?_

There’s something about the way she’d spoken before that suggests Teague had left out a crucial detail about his experience with Yilmaz which went far beyond the story he’d initially told Phil, as if whatever resentment Teague held towards her had another deeper explanation he hadn’t mentioned. A barrage of questions swirl through Phil’s head and it’s too late to think about any of them because as he stands rooted in place, dealing with the shellshock of too many revelations, the echoing footsteps finally round the corner.

A shadowed figure appears in the entryway. It’s someone with a shorter build and angled frame than Yilmaz, dressed in a fancy dress suit with pale lilac coloring and an orchid boutonniere. It’s the only details Phil can make out with any clarity. The off cast light pouring in to the dark room from the hallway beyond is too dim for Phil to see the person’s face and it must be the same for the stranger too because at first they seem not to notice Phil at all, glancing into the shadows with a causal offhand manner.

“I thought I heard someone in here. For your sake, Fergus, I hope it’s not you or I promise that will be the last glass of Chateau Lafite you’ll ever have the pleasure of slacking off on the job to drink in secret.” The person speaks and immediately, with a new cloak of goose bumps covering the back of his arms and the nape of his neck, Phil’s earlier shock magnifies his dread back into a five alarm state of panic as he instantly recognizes the voice as belonging to none other than Ashton.

 He’s not surprised when Ashton’s head jerks up to stare directly at him then. His heart is thrashing wildly with a thunderous beat he can hear in his ears and he can only imagine what it must sound like to a vampire.

 _Probably like a washing machine on the fritz_. _One with a bag of rocks thrown inside._

Ashton takes a step closer. Phil can see his face clearly now and there’s no mistaking that familiar contemptuous expression for anyone other than the vampire who had nearly killed him before.

A pause then, a tense moment as Ashton squints at him in plain faced disbelief. He takes another few cautious steps into the room as if still unsure of the person in front of him, but then recognition dawns on his face and he points at Phil accusatorily.

“ _You!”_ He spits the word between his teeth. “What are you doing here? How did you get in here?”

“Long story actually.” Phil’s surprised he can manage a response at all, but then he supposes that was the funny thing about fear; how its very nature could force someone to be brave.

“I thought you’d run off. That sad hole in the wall you and the whelp call a home was empty when I arrived.” Ashton bares his fangs and circles Phil as he talks, unwittingly imitating Yilmaz, but where her intentions had been mostly rooted in curiosity, he walks in a frenetic pace full of murderous wrath.

“You humiliated me, you and your friend both. No one, not one vampire or human alive in all my years of dedicated service to the Court, has ever mocked me. Now it’s all they do. It’s all anyone talks about when I turn my back. Not even the Court saw fit to grant me retribution even after I requested it, demanded it, after I pleaded for it like a dog begging for scraps, after I’ve been nothing but devoted to their cause. But now…oh _now_.” Ashton laughs and he sounds exactly as unhinged as he looks. “Now I will take what I deserve. You and I will pick up where we left off and I promise you, no one will save you this time. I don’t care how you got in here. If fate saw fit to put you in my path again I’ll gladly take advantage of the opportunity. As for your ‘hero,’ consider him good as gone. Eris and the rest of the Court have him and if he does manage the miracle of leaving their conclave alive, it will only be in time to see you dead.”

“You seem very upset. Maybe we could just talk about this,” Phil says quickly while holding up his hands in a warding gesture.

“There is nothing to talk about. I will take what I’m owed,” Ashton seethes. “Besides, you had a chance to escape and you chose to come here instead. Why? Did you think you could rescue your friend, laughable as the idea may be?”

“Yeah, actually, I did. I still do.”

Ashton pauses. His mouth is stretched into a grimace of clenched teeth and in the shadows of the room it makes Ashton’s face look like a skull, not of a human but of some primal animal with deep blank eye sockets and bleached fangs jutting out from its jaw. He’s so close now Phil’s entire body prickles uncomfortably at the small gap of distance left between them, too disturbed at the skull like countenance staring back at him.

“You, a human, thought you could break into the Court’s mansion and take away the new blood on your own, without any weapon, skill or strategy at your disposal to help you?”

“Er, pretty much.” Phil nods. There was no point denying it this time, but now that Ashton had mentioned it, Phil thinks he wouldn’t mind having some kind of weapon or shield to brandish at the vampire leering at him from inches away. Anything would be better than standing frozen in the middle of the room with his hands balled into empty fists at his sides, tensing for whatever Ashton had in store. It was all well and good for Yilmaz to laud his inner fortitude and cunning, but when that was the only thing standing between him and Ashton’s unbalanced fury, he’s not sure he can buy the whole spiel about intuitive strength triumphing over physical strength.

“You really thought you could win?” Ashton looks incredulous. “You thought you alone would be enough to take on the Court and an entire mansion of vampires and survive? That idea is more insulting than the embarrassment you caused me. You pathetic creature.” He sounds oddly sympathetic as he says it and his expression, although still angry, takes on a look of sly, misdirected intelligence. “You have nerve, I’ll give you that much. For a human it’s quite impressive in fact. In some ways, you and I are quite similar.”

 _Somehow I doubt that_ , Phil thinks.

“Before I was turned, when I still counted myself among the mundane mortals of this world, I was a brigadier dedicated to the service of the army, to maintaining my family’s estate and its distinguished name, but secretly I always wanted more; something better, something different, something beyond the ken of rigid codes of conduct and moral proprieties. And so of course when I learned of the Court, when I understood exactly what they were I sought them out. I confronted them alone, in a house much like this one, with only my wits and an Enfield revolver to defend me– the last of which was a useless thing which stood a better chance at jamming than firing had I decided to use it. Not that it would have worked anyway, not against creatures such as them. It was foolish to wander into their domain alone and unprotected, but I wanted to test my luck. Like you, I risked everything to steal into their residence unawares. I wanted to find the evidence of that eternally elusive ‘something better, something different’ and I did. I saw it, felt it, tasted it and later, I became it.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” Phil says. “My life’s better and different as it is. I just want Dan back.”

“Oh no, no, no, you can’t fool me.” Ashton wags his finger at Phil and he lets out another crazed wheezing laugh. “Dan’s not the only thing you want back. You want him and all the powerful blood he’s full of. Don’t deny it, not when I can smell his mark on you like the stink of sweat in a flophouse. He _bit_ you. That boy made you feel a rush and you liked it. All that strength coiling against you, all that danger and potential overwhelming you to bring you the sweetest high no drug on earth will ever match. You knew what it meant to survive something like that. You experienced the potential of what it could mean to own that strength for yourself. Not just strength, but an eternity of nights to bend to your will, to bring new fascination into the world. Don’t tell me you’ve never yearned for something more, something outrageously different than the same mundane series of events which plague all humans, all their boring conversations and tedious drudgery of tasks and social niceties. What we are goes beyond the pale of human limitations. To be one of us is to be free, to be eternally independent of all boundaries of human life. Tell me you’ve never envisioned something more, something so beautifully wild and different as to be called magic?”

He slowly advances forward as he talks and Phil blindly lurches away, keeping time with every step forward Ashton makes and matching it with another step back.

“Come now, admit it, Philip Michael Lester. Yes, I know your name. I know everything about who you are. You think I’d suffer the indignity of humiliation and not try to find out more about you?” Ashton shakes his head. “Oh, this is rich, yes, what better way to spite that snotty brat than to turn you instead of kill you? To let him watch you become my protégé after he fought to save you from me? That’s right, don’t look so shocked. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to give you everything that pitiful whelp could never dream of offering you.”

Phil’s hip painfully collides with the corner of a small antique dresser, but he ignores the sharp jolt of pain that bites into his side and continues his slow retreat away from Ashton. “That’s very generous and all, but how about I say no thank you instead,” he says.

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Look at me and tell me you’d ever consider the possibility of growing old and wasting away all your talents and foolhardy courage until time robs you of the ability to care about any of it; until age rots away all your best dreams and brightest fantasies and shunts you into a withered shell of flesh that no longer cares or remembers who you once were.”

Phil trips over a wrinkled rug half rolled up on the floor and on catching his balance on a table next to him causes its entire collection of stacked plates to cascade to the floor, but neither he nor Ashton pay any attention to the shattering clatter of porcelain. Ashton is too intent on keeping Phil’s attention and Phil is too frantic to find a way to escape so he won’t have to listen any more.

“Think about it. Think about what it would mean to have that power, Phil, to be eternally youthful and brimming with influence and potential. See it Phil, hear my words. See everything you could miss out on and then see everything you could gain.”

Ashton’s irises enlarge to inky blots. They’re huge now, shark like, vast and empty. They soon envelop the entirety of his eyes and a strange dizzy sensation overtakes Phil as he stares at them. He knows what’s happening, he’s been here before, he remembers this scenario playing out in the alley and he understands what it means, but as soon as the thought enters his mind it goes fuzzy, like a transistor radio stuck between frequencies. The feeling of alarm stays with him, telling him he should look away now before it was too late, but he can’t figure out why he should. There’s a sensation of something reaching inside his head, burrowing around with an invisible hand to busily work at shutting off every receptor of independent thought and action until he retains a muzzy, distracted sense of awareness of the world around him, unable to do much else except stand frozen in place, caught in a trance he can’t shrug off. Distantly, he wonders if this is what it felt like to be a mage in a Final Fantasy game who’d just had silence cast onto them, in effect robbing them of their most essential ability of self-defense to render them vulnerable to whatever attack was soon to follow.

 _Should nip down to Marks and Spencer’s later for some echo herbs._ This thought strikes him as absurdly funny, disjointed as it is, and he would laugh even though he’s not sure why, but the gyring dizziness increases tenfold and suddenly nothing is quite so funny anymore.

Phil’s head lolls back and vertigo knocks him off balance as he numbly takes one more halfhearted step back. He stumbles but Ashton steadies him with one hand to his arm. He wants to pulls away from the frigid clasp of that grip, but he finds it impossible to think why he should, let alone why he should go on retreating. A curious drowsy sensation of lazy compliance overtakes him and as Ashton continues to croon into his ear for him to listen and to see, the dark basement room tilts in place and Phil has the odd sensation of slowly falling  
                       down,  
                                  further  
                                               and  
                                                      further  
                                                                   down  
                                                                             into that shroud of darkness making up Ashton’s eyes, passing through it and out the other side like a parting veil to reveal the dazzling glow of daylight and then the familiar slope of the driveway leading to his old childhood home. He looks down at his hands and they’re smaller, younger. He’s a child again with his head brimming with thoughts of adventure and bright disjointed musings that throws the world around him into incredible new contexts of potential and wonder. There’s a key looped on a lanyard around his neck and it affords him an uncanny power. It doesn’t open anything more interesting than his backyard shed, but for the Kool Katz, the name he’d adopted for the small street gang of kids he’d assembled, the shed was at once a fortress and an obscure hideaway to which only he held the power to open or close at his discretion. Well after the shed had witnessed his misguided introduction to cigarettes and his subsequent expulsion from The Boys, he’d made it into a staging ground for his vision of a better, more improved club, one in which he maintained creative control, even going so far as to generate a newspaper in which he and the other members of the club would embark on small quests to find information to fill its articles with. Anything interesting would do, from knock knock jokes to fanciful stories and from doodled artwork to awards for completed tasks. Even after one of his friends, Jessica, had named herself the leader on the technicality of having better handwriting and being two years older than everyone else, things had been good. They got on well as a group and Phil enjoyed the satisfaction of having brought together this small collective of adventurers who, like him, were dedicated to the cause of creating something new and different than what anyone else had done before; certainly better than whatever The Boys were up to with their smelly packs of Mayfairs and their mystifying talks of football.

Even after one of his friends had defected and Jessica had overtaken the Kool Katz to later call it The Gang, going so far as to move its daily meetings to her friend’s Katie’s garage and instating a new mascot by way of an ASCII atrocity called Ci Ci, Phil had eventually gotten over the indignation to find other ways to bide his time in the same vein of discovery and adventure he’d been looking for when he’d first created the club.

There were fields of sweet smelling high grass full of squirrels and foraging rabbits to be discovered, abandoned buildings not yet crumbled into dust waiting to be explored, rolling mountains of clouds to study on those rare clear days when the English weather for once didn’t live up to its reputation; there were potted apple trees to crowd against the windows of his shed and pretend he lived in a tree house set in a subtropical jungle, there were sprawling country lanes to be traversed to see where they lead, idle thoughts of characters and magical lands to be turned into immersive video games he could invite his friends to play through later, tricky handstands to be attempted, stepping stones to be jumped on, horror movies to be filmed-everything was fair game.

 All the memories he associated with the bliss of his youth rush back to him like a filmed montage, rife with all the vast possibilities of his imagination and he watches it all, wide eyed in fascination.

“This is what you could have, Phil, an eternity of this feeling magnified tenfold, endless nights to explore and do with as you please without restriction.” Ashton’s voice seeps up from behind him in a murmur. “You’ll no longer have to fear growing out of yourself to become the disgruntled picture of maturity, the type of boring, cranky old man that’s forgotten what it once meant to be carefree, brave and imaginative as a child. Would you rather deny me to accept such a bleak future instead? Can you picture it, Phil? Can you see it clearly?”

Suddenly, Phil can and as soon as he does, wishes he hadn’t.

Everything is different now. The bright daytime glow of his childhood memories recedes into the dull overcast color scheme of a gloomy film noir. He feels different as well. His entire body has adopted a subtle but definite slouch. His head feels like a heavy load of bricks on his neck and his thoughts feel heavier than even that. On a glance down at his hands he’s dully shocked to see them weathered with age. In this timeline of his life he’s no longer the portrait of the vibrant child he once was, instead, as he ambles along a busy London thoroughfare with a slow pained gait, he feels distinctly angry and bitter; utterly short tempered and snappish if not altogether impatient with everything and everyone around him. The very sight of children annoys him. The sounds of their laughter and the way they run past him without a care grates him to no end. They’re careless and ignorant and too bloody loud. For an instant Phil remembers ‘Frustrated Joe’ from the train and in this moody universe he finds himself for the first time empathizing with the man’s indignation over the squalling baby he had to share the car with. London itself has changed with the onset of his new worldview. It’s no longer a sprawling metropolis full of places to see and things to do; it’s just one more chaotic, smelly city in the world catering to too many tourists and too many cars. He’s walking along an industrial sector now, one full of smokestacks and idling lorries for as far as he can see, headed towards a warehouse where he has the instant dawning realization that he’s employed as one among the many who lift their weight in boxes and office files all waiting to be organized for the mass corporation they work for. Within the myriad of identical long corridors full of packaged inventory and whirring forklifts he’s praised for being the realist, for keeping his feet planted firmly on the ground and for initiating all conversations with the expected trifecta of subjects revolving around the weather, traffic and local office gossip instead of unconventional icebreakers like witty puns or obscure facts. His YouTube career exists now only as an embarrassing footnote in his life to be brought up by his colleagues as an anecdote to tease him with once the usual discussions about traffic congestion on Uxbridge Road has been exhausted.

He sinks into the drudge of the day to day shift, repeating the same gestures and conversations ad nauseam in a mechanical fashion until he feels every bit the robot he’d once joked about being. Nothing changes here. He doesn’t expect it to and he doesn’t think it worth the trouble to try anymore. What use was creativity and adventure if this would always be the final outcome? What use was dreaming about projects and pondering the absurdity of idle thoughts if the only reward to be gained was the same dull monotony of unending tasks without deviation? The world could be cruel to its dreamers, especially when they outgrew the reprieve of youth and he’d decided it no longer was worth the trouble to remain young at heart if the only dividends it yielded was boisterous laughter from strangers who couldn’t believe he’d kept the same fringe swept haircut for years and that he’d once filmed videos featuring weird childhood anecdotes and quizzes guessing between people or rats. That era of his life seems a far cry from the staid day to day grind of his nine to five shift with a wardrobe consisting of the same starched black and white uniform instead of the closet full of colorful shirts and prints he once favored. Yet, it’s only appropriate for this current timeline where the unremarkable, stuffy clothes fit his new point of view. Nothing moves him anymore. People are boring and so is the world. Here, in the warehouse surrounded by the trundling unchanging racket of machinery and tired conversations he could repeat verbatim, he’s long since decided things would be as they were and so would he until age or use finally ran its course.

“Neruda once wrote that life is only a borrowing of bones, but to be one of us is to have and be everything you are right now forever,” Ashton croons at him. “You could have all of what humanity would deny you. You could have your dreams- all your adventures, fantasies and passions without restriction. You could be forever young and indomitable. You could be a ruler, a king unto yourself, someone wiser, keener, stronger and even better than _him.”_

Phil doesn’t need to ask what Ashton means by the last part as the inflection of vitriol is enough to get the point across that by ‘ _him_ ’ he means Dan.

“Look at yourself, see what you could become if you shed your humanity and banished all insecurity which comes from being a mortal creature subject to old age, misery and death.”

At his words, a figure approaches from off the horizon, walking steadily past the crowd of workers bustling back and forth in the warehouse, all of whom ignore the stranger completely. There’s still a fair distance between the advancing figure and Phil, enough to render them indistinguishable to each other, but with another stroke of dawning clarity Phil instantly realizes the person growing nearer with every step is none other than his own double. As soon as this thought enters his head, the clanking whirr of forklifts and the droning burble of voices around him cut off into silence.

“See him, see what you could become.”

His double closes the distance at last and Phil’s first immediate thought is that it looks beautiful. His second thought is that it looks cruel.

 It’s him, but at the same time, it’s not. This Phil’s hair is swept up and back from his forehead in a tousled wave to replace his layered fringe and his face carries an expression of shrewd cunning. He walks with an effortless, purposeful stride and although his stature is the same, this Phil seems taller somehow, more solidly built, with wide broad shoulders beneath the fitted leather jacket he wears. It’s like a version of how he’d envisioned himself as a “badass Phil” from another universe, a rebel composed of a poised, intimidating bearing who daily rode sleek cruiser motorcycles down the thruway and who actually lived up to his old messenger username by snowboarding down black diamond slopes with ease instead of toiling away in the grey atmosphere of an industrial warehouse. This illusory Phil has a small smile on its face as it walks closer, but it’s not welcoming or friendly at all. One corner of its mouth leans towards more of a derisive smirk than a true smile, affording a glimpse of the small needle sharp fangs beneath its lips.

It reaches Phil at last and stops a foot away. Up close, the resemblance between them is even more startling, save for the blank shining eyes staring back at him which are empty of all care or affection.

 _I always wondered what it might be like to meet my double, but this is so surreal,_ Phil thinks.

He’s utterly captivated and barely manages to resist the urge to reach out and touch its face to see if it was as real as it looked.

“Just think. You could have this for yourself.” His reflection speaks and its voice is a husky, sensual baritone deeper and lower than his own. “You could have the adventure and mystery of it, all the danger and confidence that comes with being an immortal creature. Who wants a normal life? Who wants pain and old age and bad thoughts? Not you. No, you want something more, something better- something like me.”

A rippling sense of foreboding passes through him and Phil automatically steps away or tries to. His feet are 10 ton weights attached to his legs and even as he manages to budge an inch backwards, his reflection quickly moves forward to close the distance, crowding him in until their foreheads almost touch, intimately close and uncomfortable.

“Just a little pain, a little discomfort and then you can be me- you can finally be _yourself_ \- forever.”

The other Phil’s smile broadens to demonstrate the full length of the fangs it would use to do the quick work of granting him the dubious blessing of an irrevocable change and Phil, for his part, begins to find the offer more compelling than he previously had. Why shouldn’t he take the chance? If he resisted, time would always work to conspire against him, robbing him of all his friends and family, leaving him bereft of all the familiar faces he’d once loved and never allowing him time or opportunity to make new friends in their stead. Ashton’s bleak vision of his future had already shown him what was likely to happen in the years to follow when the glow of youth and success had faded off into obscurity, leaving him to contend with the encroaching prospect of death and the absence of hope. Who wouldn’t give in and take the opportunity to live forever? He’d said no to Dan’s offer only on the technicality of neither of them understanding how to go about such a crucial transformation where the slightest mistake would mean death for him anyway. But here he was being offered a sure way to immortality and he wonders what was a little pain and discomfort if eternal youth was the guarantee?

Something races by in his thoughts like the wailing shriek of a police siren quickly zipping off into the distance, a blip of a warning that’s lost as quickly as it had occurred to him. This is wrong, everything about this is wrong, he’s not here to accept offers from his own vampiric doppelgänger, he’s supposed to be doing something else right now, but as Phil’s head begins to tilt back to bare his neck in a clear target for the fangs to zero in on, he’s unable to think of what that could be. This was the escape he needed, the foolproof assurance against an uncertain future where he had grown old and unhappy not only with the world, but with himself too. Soon, he would become every bit like his ideal reflection. He would own all its confidence, strength and mystery for himself. This is the endgame, he thinks, this is what he was here for.

“Amazing is just something you call yourself, but now amazing can be something you are, forever.” With that, the other Phil reaches for him, bares it long glistening fangs and slowly inclines its head down towards his neck.

“Oh, come on, are you actually kidding me? I could understand the tarot cards, but are you really going to let some snooty vampire who nearly tried to kill you predict how your future’s going to be when he doesn’t even know you?” The faint blip of alarm returns in a rush from his subconscious and it takes on the amused, reassuring cadence of Dan’s voice, just as it had before in the dark of the tunnel when he’d been frantic and at a loss of where to go or what to do. He dimly understands Dan’s voice is just as much a projection of his mind as the manufactured illusion in front of him, but both of them are too real and vivid for him to deny. But as usual with anything having to do with Dan, his voice powers through the listless fog of blind compliance to instantly command Phil’s attention like a brisk snap of fingers in his ear.

“Since when have you ever let someone tell you who you are or what you’re going to be like when you’re older? You’ve always been the stubborn, ‘I do things my way because I like to and that’s the only reason I need’ type of guy. Who says you’re going to be a bitter old man later on in life or that you’re going to regret everything you accomplished when you were younger? You’ve never defined yourself by what other people think, let alone a number. You’re not six years old or sixteen anymore, but you’ve never crushed the spirit of what it meant to be those ages. You’re still the same youthful, vibrant, imaginative Phil you were years ago. Why should that change? Because society and one stranger in a basement told you so? Because you’re scared time will take everything away from you? Maybe some things are inevitable, like one day, if the world hasn’t nuked itself to dust, the sun will explode to finish the job and between then and now sad things will happen that we can’t stop or understand and many things or people we once knew and loved will leave us or change in unpredictable ways for better or for worse, but we’re here to do the best we can to survive and live anyway; to make something of ourselves for ourselves. Or to at least try. Trying is the most important part and you’ve always done exactly that for as long as we’ve known each other and as long as you still want to keep trying, no one can tell you who you’ll be or how much you might change in the future except for you. Stop freaking out and listen to _yourself_ for a change, not him. You’re the only one who knows who you really are and what you really feel like and nothing, not age or society or an illusionist mind fuck is going to change that. So snap out of it already. _Remember yourself_.”

The other Phil slowly advances. Its fangs have grown to crowd its mouth with twin dagger points aimed for the great pulsing vein in Phil’s neck. He can feel the cold frigid air of an exhale skate across his skin and between the deep chill of revulsion it inspires and the lingering echo of Dan’s words dominating his thoughts, Phil reaches the final straw of his breaking point.

He thrashes to the side to throw off the cold hands locked around his shoulders. Every move is a struggle to fight against the heavy torpor brought on by Ashton’s glamour making him feel as if he’s treading through deep water. The sluggishness tells his brain to stop, to give in, to allow himself to become the sinister, alluring double in front of him before it was too late, but this time he understands it’s only part of the illusion, the little sham of a performance Ashton is putting on to induce his cooperation.

 _That’s not me_ , Phil thinks. _That may look like me, but we don’t have anything else in common. And if I ever decide one day to change my appearance, with an upswept quiff instead of a fringe and a smooth leather jacket to complete the look, I still won’t be anything like him. I create my own way in the world. This is my life and I’m going to make of it whatever I want, however I want with whatever time I have left. And right now the only thing I want is to get out of this basement, get Dan back and go home._   

A surge of adrenaline rushes through him with that thought and he concentrates every last bit of his strength through his arms, readying himself for a last stand. With a deep breath he grits his teeth, places the flat of his palms against his reflection’s chest and in one savagely quick lunge he brusquely shoves it away. He doesn’t expect to keep his balance, but he does, bouncing back in time to watch as his defiant move catches his double completely off guard. It stumbles, all effortless grace forgotten as it trips backwards across the floor in a bumbling dance. It quickly works to remain upright with much cursing and wheeling of arms and once it straightens up again it glares at him in wide-eyed fury. It doesn’t look anything like him anymore. The features of its face bubble and roil to reveal another face peering through, one that matches the unmistakable shock and contempt of Ashton’s expression.

“You-! How did you-?!”

“I told you before,” Phil says. “My life is already better and different as it is and it’ll continue to be that way as long as I decide I want it to be that way no matter what happens or no matter how old I get. Right now, the only thing I’ve decided is that I’m getting Dan back and I’m not leaving until I do.”

“You’re a fool,” his reflection hisses. Its baritone has Ashton’s inflections of speech now and as Phil looks on its shifting face begins to look more and more like Ashton instead of Phil. “I always figured Notherners for being a sight madder and stranger than the rest, but you’re truly an example of the worst of their ilk. Ungrateful wretch. You want to meet your demise so badly, allow me to make the introductions here and now.”

“No.”

Ashton freezes in the middle of taking a stride forward and frowns. “I’m sorry?”

“I said no. I made a promise. I said I wasn’t going to let Dan face this alone and you’re going to let me pass so I can keep that promise.” Phil slowly walks forward towards Ashton instead of away as the scared part of his brain yells at him to. With every step he takes the sluggish feeling weighing down his thoughts and his body begins to ebb away. This feels more right somehow. To show his resolve he needed to confront Ashton not run away from him. After spending the better part of his evening ducking and weaving through a long dark underground tunnel, he’s tired of running away, of playing the defenseless human at the mercy of creatures who saw him as easy prey to toy with. 

 _Maybe I am, but I won’t make it easy for them_ , he thinks. _Maybe I’ll never be the ruler of the universe, but I can still confront him like one._

The hallucinatory scene in front of Phil wavers, flickering in and out of focus until it dissipates entirely leaving Ashton standing in his reflection’s place. For a wonder, Ashton is the one that looks wary now and as Phil continues to approach, he takes a half step back.

“Now hold on, let’s-let’s-” he falters as he speaks as if he can’t believe he’s about to ask Phil to ‘let’s talk about this’ as if their positions were reversed and he was now the human under attack. “Even if I decided to let you go, you’ll never make it out of this house alive. Neither of you will.”

“I’ll take my chances. I’ve already taken plenty tonight and I’m still here.”

Phil keeps walking forward calmly and Ashton keeps backing away. Another small table out of sight in Phil’s periphery collides with his thigh, but he barely feels it, determined only to not lose his resolve. He’d read stories and seen documentaries about animals standing their ground against charging predators, how sometimes an overtly defensive stance could do more to effectively ward off a threat better than any predator’s sharp claws and teeth. It had worked in the kitchen with Dan on his first night back home, before Dan had revealed what he’d become and although Phil doesn’t know if it’ll work here with a veteran vampire who had no interest or compassion for him beyond fulfilling a personal vendetta, Ashton looks properly startled, apparently not used to his marks regaining their wits to then stand their ground to challenge him. Phil’s towering shadow falls over Ashton in a dark pall more opaque than the poorly lit darkness in the room and he finds himself absurdly grateful for his height and how it well surpasses Ashton’s, lending him an elevated position of authority that makes his slow advance forward look more intimidating than he feels.

“This is absurd!” Ashton shakes his head and the smile on his face doesn’t look disdainful anymore, it looks nervous. “You really think you can face us on nothing more than the pretext of a sentimental whim and survive?”

 “I don’t know, but I’m going to try.”

“For what purpose if you’re only going to fail?”

“You don’t know that. And as for what purpose- because Dan is my friend. Because I care for him.” Phil smiles to himself. “Because I love him. Those have been the most persuasive reasons for most everything we’ve done together.”

“You’re a fool. The both of you-idiots!”

Phil shrugs. “Maybe. We regularly misplace important things, we don’t have the best coordination, we sometimes procrastinate and occasionally book taxis in the wrong time zones.” Phil continues herding Ashton backwards into the room. “And other times, we happen to confront vampires when it’s not in our best interest to, because being fools is apparently an ingrained habit neither of us can break, especially when we’re trying to look out for each other. So if we’re fools and love is foolish then I guess we’re both just playing our parts.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s because you’ve never heard the one about the hamster that stored a fridge magnet in its cheek pouch and got its face stuck to the bars of its cage for three days.”

“What the _hell_ are you on about?”

“Not sure really, the only thing I know is I’m not leaving here without Dan. You have things you feel strongly enough to defend even it’s just your own pride and so do I and right now, for me, that means getting past you and getting Dan back by any means necessary.”

He has no idea how Ashton must interpret what he’s just said, but something about his tone and the grim determination on his face must combine to make the appearance of an impressive threat because Ashton all but scrambles away from him, shuffling backwards with such speed he doesn’t notice the enormous antique bookcase behind him until he crashes into it at full force. The colossal piece totters off balance, rocking precariously to and fro, and both Phil and Ashton watch in stunned silence as the weight of the leathered volumes on the shelves finally tip it off center, letting gravity take over to do the rest of the work in yanking it backwards at breakneck velocity, straight into the network of snaking metal pipes against the far wall.

It sounds like a giant punching its fist through concrete. The resonating boom of the crash shivers the floor under Phil’s feet, but what unsettles him the most isn’t the splintered remains of the bookcase or the mountainous rubble of books around it, but the indented pipes that have been knocked off kilter from their fastenings, some of them completely fallen off and onto the floor, allowing the audible hiss and acrid stench of gas to fill up the room.

He wasn’t sure Ashton’s pale face could go any paler, but it does, turning a sickly shade of green as he ogles the destroyed gas lines.

“These were just repaired!” He gesticulates wildly, obviously distressed and Phil decides perhaps now might be the best time to cautiously back away before Ashton decided to redirect his ire towards him. “This is-I don’t-look what you’ve-!”

He doesn’t get to finish his fractured train of thought as another voice abruptly interrupts from behind them.

“What was _that?_ Ashton is that you? What’s going on?”

Phil’s head turns quickly towards the entryway to see the figure of a woman with permed curls of hair, dressed in the black uniform of a domestic helper stood peering at them from the hallway.

“Why is it so dark in here? Honestly, I know we can see well enough, but that doesn’t mean turning on the lights wouldn’t make it easier.”

Her hand snakes out to feel against the wall at her side and Phil watches on in horror as her hand reaches towards the light switch installed there. Time immediately seems to slow to an excruciating crawl as Phil recalls the distant memory of one late evening when he’d smelled faint traces of gas coming from the kitchen in their flat. He’d stayed up into the early morning hours feverishly researching Google for every possible risk and hazard to look out for until he’d been able to call the landlord to report the problem. One of the many articles he’d read that night had detailed the dangers of allowing a gas leak to reach high levels of concentration and how any spark, no matter how small, could ignite the resulting vapor cloud into a catastrophic fireball. The spark could be caused by anything, a struck match, dialing the telephone or even…turning on a light.

Ashton turns towards the newcomer and he too appears stuck in slow motion as he opens his mouth to shout out a warning for her to stop.

“Lucy, wait! Don’t-!”

Phil’s panic distorts the words into a low stretched out burble of sound he can barely decipher, not when all of his attention is trained instead on Lucy as she continues her task, oblivious to the danger. The tips of her fingers hit the bottom of the switch and as it inches its way towards the ‘on’ position, two sets of hands suddenly grab Phil’s shoulders in a painful vice and yank him backwards so roughly his feet fly up from the ground. The next instant he finds himself hurled to the floor behind the massive marble block of the funerary slab he’d seen on entering the room earlier and, before he can get a proper look at the people huddled next to him, the massive roar of an explosion rips the world apart.

The entire room dips and rolls like a plane slamming head on into turbulence. Furniture and statues combust and shatter, sending large pieces of shrapnel hurtling against the walls and towards the ceiling in deadly projectiles, some of which crash against the marble slab with blows like separate detonations. A roiling tide of heat washes over the top of the slab bringing with it a mountain of pulverized white marble dust and Phil winces away from it, pressing his body flat against the coolness of the floor. The two people next to him follow suit and press themselves closer together in a small bundle. Someone cries out in pain and the other person snatches their hand to hold it in reassurance. Phil registers these small gestures moments before another surge of heat makes him bury his head in the crook of one arm, but he can still see huge bright orange flames reaching over the edges of his makeshift shelter, hovering much too close for comfort. The entire room is bright with fire and for a time all he can see is the blinding light of the explosive blaze and all he can hear is the receding echo of the blast obliterating everything within reach. Heat singes through his clothing and against the exposed skin of his face and he curls up further into himself, desperately wondering when it’ll be over.

The explosion seems to go on for ages. Phil presses his forehead against the floor and scrunches his eyes shut, willing it to stop. He’s so focused to this end, stiff and tense with the concentrated effort of surviving, it takes him a moment before he registers someone frantically shaking his shoulder, calling his name over and over between a ragged fit of retching coughs.

“Phil! Phil, for fuck’s sake! Are you alright? Phil! Answer me!”

He cautiously raises his head and blinks past the scorching heat twinging at his eyes. Someone, an indistinct blob in the shape of a person, is hunched on their knees in front of him, still shaking his shoulder to get his attention and it takes another bleary eyed blink for him to realize the person is none other than Teague.

“God, you’re alive. I didn’t know if we threw you down too hard or if we didn’t grab you back in time or- fuck. You don’t know how glad I am to see you.” He looks glad, but he also looks spent as well, as if he’d dealt with centuries’ worth of hard times and bad troubles in the short span of their separation. The dark circles under his eyes are deeply pronounced and his hoodie is torn in several places with the left sleeve singed black from the middle of his arm to the cuff. Phil knows it must be from the explosion, that Teague must have been the person who had cried out before, apparently having left his arm partially exposed to the flames. The fingers of his left hand are covered in angry red welts of severe burns to match the state of his sleeve and Phil wonders if even a vampire would be able to heal an injury of that magnitude. Before he can think about it in greater detail and before he can open his mouth to say how outrageously glad he is to see Teague alive as well or to ask how Teague had been able to find him in time, another voice interjects from behind him.

“Don’t mean to cut this short, guys and it’s not like I’m not fucking overjoyed to see you either, Phil, but we have to get out of here. And fast.”

Phil hesitantly gathers his legs under him and raises himself to a seated position on the floor to better look over his shoulder through the charred blanket of smoke filling the room. At first all he can make out is a humanoid blur of yellow-green ( _chartreuse_ , Phil thinks automatically) before his eyes focus to recognize the familiar shape of a rain mac and the more familiar shape of the person wearing it.

“Wait- Susan?”

He’s mystified by her presence and he blinks hard to make sure this isn’t just the remnants of Ashton’s glamour making him see things which aren’t there, but Susan remains where she is, solid and real with a wan smile on her face. She too appears like she’s been through hell and back, as if she and Teague had faced down their own fair share of illusions in the unsettled darkness of the tunnels beneath the house. Straggles of hair have escaped the plaited coil around her head to hang loosely about her face which bears red scratches all across her nose and cheeks and large smudges of grime like car oil stain her clothes as if she’d wallowed her way through the culvert instead of running through it like Phil had. Clearly, many things had happened in his absence, not the least of which included the mystery of how Susan had managed to break through Teague’s hypnosis to find herself in the very place she’d been cautioned not to go. But Phil supposes if he had managed to shake off Ashton’s glamour, then it wasn’t farfetched at all to assume Susan would do the same given her already headstrong habit for bending rules or breaking them completely. It leaves him to wonder however, if Susan had uncovered the truth about all of what Teague really was and if perhaps that might in part explain their strained and tired expressions. Phil already knew how stressful it could be to weather the weight of multiple shocking revelations in one night just as he’d done with Dan. He can’t imagine the magnitude of their discussions or what they’d experienced down in the tunnels, but despite her battle worn appearance and weary expression, Susan looks sincerely relieved to see him.

 “I know, I know,” she says. “Not really supposed to be here, am I? Long story short, homeboy’s hocus pocus didn’t work out as well as he expected it to and now I’m along for the party. None too soon either by the looks of things.” She gives a sideward nod to indicate the monstrous blaze crackling away with heated fervor on the other side of the marble slab. “I’m sure we all have more exciting details to share about our personal near death experiences, but we can do it while we’re busy not getting our arses cooked alive.”

As she says it, Phil inadvertently inhales a pocket of heat and smoke. It scorches its way down his throat and he buckles forward in a fit of coughing. Teague waits for the coughs to subside before asking, “can you stand?”

“I think so.” Phil tries and his legs totter weakly beneath him, but they hold his weight and he manages to straighten up. Susan and Teague quickly do the same.

“We need to find the stairs and get out of here,” Teague says. “Shouldn’t be too far off from this room. Well, let’s hope anyway. Just follow me and keep your heads low.”

With that he carefully edges away from their shelter with Susan and Phil following close behind him. The sight that greets Phil as they emerge draws him up short. The large room has turned into a gutted landscape of towering flames. Nothing remains of the once impressive menagerie of furniture, statues and knick knacks crowding every inch of space except for charred bundles of wood and twisted pieces of metal. Ashton is nowhere in sight, not that Phil thinks even he could survive the ferocity of that explosion, immortal or not. If Ashton still remained in this room it had to be as one of the many vaporized motes of ash swirling above the raging fire. A glint of color amidst the blackened debris catches his eye and Phil looks down to see a scrap of lilac colored fabric slowly curling up into flames. A charred orchid boutonniere lies beside it, the only remnants left of Ashton’s exquisitely cut suit and of Ashton himself. Not keen on sharing the same fate, Phil trails Teague past the billowing smoke with one hand clapped over his mouth and nose in a meager attempt to filter clean air through his fingers. He glances behind him once in curiosity to peer back at the marble slab which had saved them and is stunned to notice a long deep crack fissuring it neatly right down the middle.

 _If the explosion had been any stronger, that would have blasted apart taking us with it_ , he thinks. A _mazingphil would be AmillionpiecesPhil. Not really as catchy to be honest…._

Sparks fly up and churn towards his face making his eyes water even as he ducks away, blurring the flames into a spinning bokeh effect of orange white lights. Teague and Susan become little more than dark silhouettes moving ahead, like long spindly no faces wobbling off into the bright vortex of flames and smoke around him. He blinks hard and tries to keep pace with them as every short breath he pulls through his nose scorches the lining of his throat. They’ve nearly managed to make it to the door without incident when something else on the floor grabs Phil’s attention. At first, he can’t tell what he’s looking at. The stinging tears at the corners of his eyes turns the object into a bright pink formless blob of color, but then he blinks and the color takes shape as the pink quartz hippo statue he’d seen before on the table with Yilmaz’s tarot cards. Out of all the demolished wreckage in the room, only this remains strangely intact, a defiant little hippo lying on its side with its mouth open in a frozen roar at the flames steadily creeping along the floorboards to engulf it.

As soon as Phil sees it he knows he needs to pick it up with the same inexplicable reflex which had told him to pick up Yilmaz’s ring before he’d known how crucial it would prove to be in his encounter with her.

“Are you mad? What are you doing?” Teague yells over the sound of crackling flames as Phil turns back and ducks towards the floor to retrieve the statue. It’s hot in his hand like a flaming coal and one side of its tiny ear is chipped, but otherwise it’s fine. He doesn’t think he’ll stand the chance of running into any more eldritch vampires who might pay him back for finding their lost hippo family heirloom, but its survival amidst the carnage of the explosion hints at a measure of luck, something Phil thinks they could use in whatever quantity right now. Maybe it was nothing but a chunk of carved quartz, as Dan might have said if he were here, just a pretty crystal that had landed on the side of extraordinary coincidence to remain whole when everything else in the room had not, but in that moment, to Phil, it stands for something more, a peculiar symbol of endurance and good fortune and without giving it another thought Phil resolves to keep it.

“Sorry, I just- needed to get this.”                                                         
 Phil quickly turns back to catch up with the others while stuffing the statue in his jacket pocket, but it’s too bulky to fit properly, leaving its roaring head to stick out absurdly from his side.

“Breaking and entering, arson and now looting. Never thought I’d get into this much trouble in one night before.” Susan gives a hoarse cough that sounds painful, but then she laughs as if she’s genuinely enjoying herself despite the inferno licking at their heels.

“Nah, who are you kidding,” Teague calls over his shoulder with a broad grin. “This used to be your typical day in the life, minus the arson.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Guess we can add ‘accidental arson’ to the list now.”

“Is that even a thing,” Phil asks.

Susan shrugs. “It is now. How’s it feel to be a delinquent?”

“Oh, it’s a blast really.”

“Was that...a pun?” Teague groans and shakes his head as Susan cough-laughs into the crook of her elbow.

The splintering crash of something large and heavy giving way to the fire directs their attention back to the business of escaping and they hurriedly cross the rest of the room hunched below the line of black smoke pillaring sideways above them. They reach the entryway and spill out into the corridor beyond in a stumbling rush. The air outside the room is blessedly clear and Phil pauses to take deep heaving breaths of it. Next to him, Susan does the same. When his coughs subside into calm even breaths Phil takes a minute to pause and compose himself and as he does he’s finally able to observe the state of his friends in greater detail without the immediate threat of third degree burns to worry about. They’re covered in the same murky splotches of filth from the tunnels. only this time their hair and clothing is dusted with a thick coating of ash and dust as well. They look like escapees of a volcanic eruption and Phil knows he must look the same.

 _If anyone else sees us, there’s no way we’ll be mistaken for party guests now_ , he thinks. _Unless it’s a demolition party._

For a time the only sounds come from the loud riot of sizzling flames and shattering glass behind them as more objects explode from the swelling heat. It’s only a matter of time before the hallway fills up with the same toxic mixture of smoke and flames, especially given the rate of the fire swallowing up everything in its path like a voracious creature gradually working its way out of the room to make the rest of the basement into easy kindling to speed its progress along. Phil is certain once the fire ate its way through the floorboards above, it would swiftly move to consume the rest of the house. He’d already seen good sized holes punched through the ceiling by the explosion, allowing the blaze easier access to spread. If they didn’t find Dan now, facing the wrath of the Court would be the last thing they’d ever have to worry about.

“The stairs are over this way. Let’s go!” Teague begins to sprint ahead down the hall, but Susan hesitates and hangs back, peering down at the floor.

“Hang on. There’s someone here.”

Phil squints to see better and the seemingly lifeless body of a person reveals itself in the shadows, someone dressed in a black uniform with a froth of curls arranged about their head. It’s Lucy, Phil realizes an instant later and he cautiously approaches her. She remains motionless, like a doll that had been flung at the wall with great force and had landed on the floor in a haphazard bundle of limbs with her head turned at an uncomfortable angle against her right shoulder. On a human, Phil would have called it a broken neck.

“Is she…dead?”

“Technically? I mean, yeah, she is. So am I,” Teague says as he wanders over to inspect Lucy’s prone form. If Susan finds this comment strange or disturbing she gives no sign and instead continues looking down at Lucy with mild interest. “But as for being _dead_ dead, no, she’s just unconscious. Probably got nailed by the shock wave. She’ll come back around to give us hell in no time. Let her be.”

Phil stares at him. “We can’t just leave her. Not with the fire that close.”

“She works for the court. She might as well be one of the Court. If she was conscious right now and you were alone she’d have killed you or toyed with you until you begged for her to kill you. That’s the way it is in here. She wouldn’t have any consideration for you if you were in her place right now. Believe me.”

“But I’m not in her place. I’m just me and I’m not letting her burn to death while she’s unconscious, Teague.” Phil says it softly, but it’s in a firm tone that plainly expresses if Teague didn’t help, he’d drag Lucy up the stairs the best way he could by himself.

Susan steps up beside him and folds her arms. “I’m with him on this.”

Clearly outnumbered, Teague clenches the fingers of his burnt left hand and grimaces, whether from pain or from annoyance Phil can’t tell, but then Teague’s hand relaxes with a shudder, as if he were recalling the distinct pain and discomfort of the fire and had decided perhaps he really didn’t want to go along with consigning someone else to a worse fate than just a burnt hand via death by immolation, even if it was someone he had no sympathy for.

“Alright, alright. I’ll carry her then.” He relents with a sigh and shakes his head. “Hope she remembers she owes you lot her life.”

He leaves off with a grumble of, “fucking mental,” but he stoops down and gathers Lucy up in an awkward fireman’s carry over his right shoulder. She’s much taller than him by more than a few inches. Her feet nearly drag along in front of him despite being picked up and she seems close to sliding over his shoulder headfirst back onto the floor, but with another mumbled curse under his breath Teague shifts her weight and manages to keep his grip. With a curt nod of his head he signals for the others to follow him as he briskly strides past the rest of the rooms lining the corridor, down towards the darkened stairwell at the other end. Another resonating crash from the burning room makes them quicken the pace but just when they’ve reached the bottom of the stairs, Teague abruptly stops in front of the second to last room on his right and stares in with an expression of single minded horror on his face.

“What?” Phil glances back and forth between him and the room. “What is it? What?”

“Do you see this?” Teague points inside, but all Phil sees when he follows the direction of his finger is a long sprawling area filled with what must be hundreds upon hundreds of metal vats and barrels stacked in neat lines leading to a vanishing point lost somewhere in the dense shadows in the distance. Susan peers from behind his arm and gives a long, low whistle.

“Well, shit,” she says and her scratched face looks ashen with fright.

“Chateau Lafite, Chateau Margaux, Moutai, Macallan M, Russo-Baltique,” Teague begins to list names and before Phil can ask what he’s talking about, he clarifies. “Cognacs, tequilas, baijiu, whiskeys, vodkas and wine. You name it, the best of the best spirits, and it’s in this room. No Pimms though, talk about a sacrilege.” He laughs, but it sounds low and halfhearted at best. “Always knew the Court had a lucrative seat in trades, the black market variety mind you, I just didn’t know _how_ lucrative it was. This house is literally sitting on thousands- nah, millions of pounds worth of alcohol. That’s nearly as many gallons of alcohol there is too.”

He turns slowly to look at Phil. “Gas explosion is one thing, that’s bad enough. If that leak had been given time to build up to higher levels, neither of us would be here talking right now. But take the amount of high proof combustible alcohol in there and combine it with fire and what do you think will happen?”

The room seems to stretch on for the same length as the huge mansion built on top of it, filled with endless processions of barrels and bottles of liquor. With this much ready fuel stored in close proximity to the growing blaze just a few rooms down, Phil has the clear mental image of the house imploding into a giant fireball greater than the explosion they’d just survived, one in which they too would join Ashton in his new existence as a pile of dust. He swallows hard, unable to speak and Teague nods in complete understanding of everything he can’t say.

“Yeah, that’s right, we’ll be celebrating Bonfire Night ahead of schedule, firework explosions and all, only this time we’ll be the ‘guys’ what get burned.”

“Kind of preferred it better when we were being chased by whatever that voice was in the tunnel,” Susan says in a faint voice.

Phil does a double take and stares at her. “You too?”

“Oh, you had the pleasure of running into that thing first?” She laughs, but there’s no hint of amusement in her voice. “Yeah, when I came to and left the car, properly pissed you two had gone off and left me sitting there like a twat after messing with my thoughts- (“sorry, sorry,” Teague mumbles and Phil has the impression this isn’t the first time tonight he’s apologized to her) I wandered in to find you and that- _whatever_ it was- kept following me. I started running and it started running too and eventually herded me straight into Teague. Then it chased us both until Teague tried confronting it and it decided to piss off somewhere else. I couldn’t see anything, I could only hear it, the way it sounded like it was only a few paces behind us the entire time, waiting for us to get tired so it could pounce and grab us easier. It was like being in the sewers in that Stephen King movie, ‘It,’ running from god knows what. Fucking terrifying…” Susan rubs her arms and shudders, as if trying to physically shake off the memory of her ordeal. “But I’ll take that over getting cooked well done. At least I’d have the satisfaction of fighting for my life. Here though, when the time is up we’re up too. No second chances or last minute saves. It’s all or nothing. If we’re going to get your friend and get out of here, we better do it now.”

“Way ahead of you kids.”

Phil and Susan look up, startled, to see Teague already climbing the stairs with Lucy bouncing minutely over his shoulder like a sack of flour as he moves from step to step. The smoke from the burning room down the hall begins to collect in billowing curtains of oily, foul smelling clouds, inching closer and closer to the storage room with its endless vaults of liquor and without another word Phil quickly turns away to join Teague up the stairs with Susan shadowing right beside him. The stairs lead up through the darkness to a door allowing entry to the proper first floor level of the great house beyond, itself filled with unknown threats and dizzying rooms to rival the ones Phil had just left behind. He doesn’t know what they’ll find waiting for them on the other side of the door, if the Court might have been alerted to the explosion already or if there were other stewards like Ashton waiting to take him into custody or kill him on sight; But somehow those are lesser worries in the face of the greater concern of finding Dan before the flames found the liquor storage first.

“ _Many things will change, many things will happen, and you must be prepared to meet it all head on._ ”

He remembers Yilmaz’s words from her card reading and wonders just how could he prepare to meet anything head on before he had a clue what it was, especially if what lay beyond the basement door might be more dangerous and unpredictable than the explosion he’d only barely survived.

 _I’m not alone this time, so there’s that_ , he thinks. W _hatever’s waiting for us out there, we’ll face it together. I have friends and I have myself. We’re still alive, we’re still here, still ready to fight. It might not be much, but it’s something and I’ll take it for whatever it’s worth._  

He straightens his back, unyielding and firm in his convictions and behind him Susan pauses with her foot hovering in the middle of placing it on the next step. She stares at his profile as he continues up the stairs and she’s not sure if it’s just the dense shadows in the stairwell or the noxious smell of smoke in her nostrils making her loopy, but as she’d glanced at Phil’s tall stature with his broad shoulders set high and his face settled into a portrait of measured sangfroid, for a second, as he’d passed her, she thought he looked like a king.

 

❧

 

 

Far above the basement and the conflagration developing unawares, Dan strains to hear what might be going on in the rooms and floors beneath his feet, but other than the initial explosion, he doesn’t sense anything else over the constant riot of the storm thundering on outside the windows of his glistening whitewashed prison and the Court bickering amongst themselves in grating tones at the table. He feels like a child listening to their parents arguing about them in the third person, awkwardly left to contend with a discussion he’d rather not be present to hear. Cavall’s cheerful presence would come in handy right now to mitigate the tense energy in the room, but since disappearing down the hall earlier Dan hasn’t heard anything more from him either, not a single bark or whine to hint at where he could be in the house or what he might be up to, if he might have gone off to raid a cupboard for more of his beloved crisps or if perhaps he’d gone to investigate the mysterious source of the explosion in the basement. Dan would like to think the latter is more likely and if so he’d also like to think Cavall had found Phil and was at this moment offering assistance in the best doglike way he could, even if it was only to slobber profusely on Phil’s hand in greeting. It’s a better, more optimistic thought than imagining Phil getting caught in the middle of whatever that explosion had been and not being able to walk away from it. It doesn’t stop his brain from supplying the image in crude detail however and Dan tries to shunt it away through force of will by redirecting his thoughts to focus on the task of escaping this room in order to get to Phil and make sure for himself that everything was alright.

He’s not sure how he’ll manage that specific feat however. The windows, like every other window in the house, is latticed over with impenetrable iron bars preventing a tuck and roll smash through the glass, not that he’s particularly keen on the idea when there was nothing between him and the hard ground outside except for too many feet of open air and no parachute or mattress to soften his landing. There’s also no way he thinks he’ll manage to escape down the hall and activate the control panel to open the mirror entrance door they’d come through before one of the Court swatted him against a wall, more likely before he’d even made it four paces out of this room.

 _It’s four against one. Terrible odds_ , Dan thinks glumly. _Five if I count George, because I don’t think he’ll be game to go against the Court for my sake even if he was going to help me escape before. I have to do this on my own and…I don’t know if I can._

He'd said before to himself that he’d work with what he had in order to leave, even if what he had was exactly nothing, but they seem like big words now, when having exactly nothing left him exactly nowhere.

The room supplies nothing he could reasonably exploit the use of, except for a pair of polished broadswords hanging crisscrossed above the fireplace, themselves also painted white from the tip of the blades to the pommel of their hilts. They’re obviously meant for decoration, but other than being clean and well-kept they also look devastatingly functional. One good swing combined with the downward weight of the blade and he could chop a person in half or do enough damage in one blow as to make no difference. Dan can’t tell if the blades are sharp or not, but he’s almost certain if the Court were such dedicated sticklers for detail, enough to meticulously spackle their fireplaces with skulls and install aquariums in the floors of their lounge, they’d also insist on the swords being regularly honed to a razor edge. Still, he can’t see himself dashing over to tear one down and brandish it against the Court like an overeager LARPer who’d become too lost in their part.

_I mean, what am I, Cloud? Those things are huge and no matter how much strength I have now to be able to lift one I have no idea how to go about using it effectively. Makhai would probably wrestle it out of my hands and knock my head off before I even turned around._

He crosses the swords off his mental list of possible helpful tools and continues looking around the room. The Court take no notice of his inquisitive stares and continue speaking amongst themselves in upraised tones Dan can clearly hear.

“I for one am astounded,” Eris is saying to Makhai. “Two literary quotes in a single evening from you, first Kafka then your abhorred Shakespeare. Never figured you for the bookish type.”

 “Yes, surprise, surprise,” Makhai says dryly. “I’m not just the brawn muscled heavy in a bad gangster film and even they had some degree of culture. Besides, not everything was pretentious rot with Shakespeare. Just most of it. Now, Sophocles- that was a thing. Blood, betrayal and the ire of violent gods. Which is just another Wednesday night for us.”

“I thought today was Friday?” Lethe looks up distractedly from the mosaic of broken glass she continues to idly arrange and then rearrange into jigsaws of her own making. “That song always gets stuck in my head and when it does I think every day is Friday. That happen to anyone else?”

Eris ignores her and continues speaking to Makhai. “I just believe you should reconsider. He did put up a good fight throughout your little demonstration. How many other new bloods could defy a glamour that powerful? He survived an encounter with one of the most dangerous of our kind, staved off a steward, controlled his hunger and through it all, manages to continue to resist us. Come on. Tell me you’re not intrigued.”

“I’m not intrigued.”

“Liar.” She leans towards him and gives a needling smile. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you were scared of all the rumors. The ones that say the only person capable of destroying the Night Court would be one of Yilmaz’s progeny. _That’s_ why you don’t want him here.”

“You’re hardly an idiot, Eris, so stop talking like one,” Makhai snaps. “He’s a sapling of a new blood with all the muscle mass and wit of a withered jellyfish. I’m not worried about him posing a threat to us. He’s a waste of time. He represents it in every fiber of his being. It would be more merciful and efficient for everyone to not inflict his existence on the world or on us any longer.”

“But consider the possibility of leverage. We are not what we once were. And appearances are everything. With him here…” She leaves the sentence open ended and after a minute Makhai grunts and leans back in his chair in subdued silence as if he’d understood all of what she’d left out and needed to mull it over.

“Once upon a time we had this same argument about that idiotic dreamer of a new blood who was Teague’s friend and you remember how that turned out.” He shakes his head. “Defiance isn’t always an indicator of worth or intellect.”

“That was different.”

“No, it wasn’t. When he was pushed to prove himself he failed. He was weak, just like this one is weak. Throw them into conflict, let them mete out their fates with actions instead of words, let me see them fight and burn– _that’s_ the sport I live for.”

Eris sighs and reaches over to pour herself another glass of blood from the decanter on the table. “You have such a grisly way of looking at people.”

“It’s the only way to look at people. If he’s to appear before us and prove his worth then the price of our attention should be approximate to an effort that’s more than flowery speeches and lax defiance. He challenges our court, our laws and our pronouncements. Let him match words with actions. I want to see him fight for our favor and fight for his survival, whether he actually survives or not.”

Aeacus nods slowly. “I’m not adverse to this idea. If he won’t answer our questions allow him to rise to the challenge and earn the right to live. We could let George stand off against the new blood. He’s been a loyal addition to this household for many years now, better than any stewards in our service. He’d be a worthy candidate to sit at this table with us should Daniel fail.”

 At the mention of his name, George stands straighter at attention although he continues looking forward into the distance with the same specious unfocused gaze as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

“Yes, let each of them prove themselves,” Aeacus says. “Let the victor exemplify the traits of strength, force and will we require. No more words. I am with Makhai. Let their actions speak for themselves.”

Next to him, Lethe sings “Friday” under her breath, repeating the chorus over and over as if those were the only lyrics she could remember, but she breaks off suddenly mid ‘Friday’ to chime in to the conversation. “So they’ll fight? Aw, that’s really a shame, Daniel’s going to die you know and he’s such a nice person too. But if he wins, it all seems pretty useless if he won’t agree to join with us.”

“Negotiations can be arrived at later,” Eris says. “He put up a good fight against Makhai, but I don’t think he’ll do the same when we show him the extent of everything we can offer. Well, if he survives of course. The young ones are always the most malleable. Especially when they’re as unsure of themselves as he is. Think of it as a fresh blank slate to work with, a new blood we can easily mold and teach to our mutual advantage.”

“And what of the human-”- Aeacus lazily twirls his hand in the air, searching for the name. “What of this Phil he speaks of?”

Makhai gives a derisive snort. “What about him? He’s a human. Another entertainer like this one. He’s no threat. What? Do you expect him to come waltzing in here with an army and overtake us? Forget him. If he ever does show his face, then he’ll provide us with a tasty pick-me-up, better and fresher than this slop.” He gestures at the decanter with a brusque wave and nearly topples it over.

“There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just gone a bit cold, that’s all.” Eris rolls her eyes and sips from her glass.

“True. Especially considering this varietal was provided by a lawyer and they do tend to run more cold-blooded than most humans. We’ll have to look into drinking a beachcomber next time,” Makhai says and everyone at the table laughs. “Ah, for some good, fresh blood. Let our Daniel spill it for us, be it his own or George’s. I haven’t seen a proper battle since the coliseum.”

Lethe perks up at the word. “Oh, oh that’s right! We sang an epinicion when it was over, when the victors had their fêtes, do you remember?”

“I’m surprised _you_ do, but yes, I remember and not fondly. We’d seen all the exciting blood and grit of fights to rival the Maximus events, yet afterwards we had to raise our cups and drone on in stilted poetry about the success of a victor none of us cared about beyond their show in the arena. I care even less for the new blood, but if he manages to pique my attention with a surprising display of skill and survival then so much the better. We haven’t had good entertainment in ages. Just don’t expect me to raise my voice in an old hymn if he wins. I want the blood of his struggle. Nothing more interests me about him.”

Their conversations continue wheeling about his head as if he were hardly present to hear them and as they gleefully discuss the thought of his impending demise or of making him into a pawn to use for their advantage should he survive, Dan clenches his hands into fists at his sides and his fangs protrude further past his gums to bite into the soft flesh of his bottom lip, painfully sharp, but he hardly feels it. He’s furious, a rare thing for him. Usually frustration and impatience won out over true anger, but this is important, this is his life and it’s suddenly being haggled in front of him like market goods.

 _In life you get to choose a path for yourself_ , he thinks. _You get to decide how much you’re willing to relent and how much you’re willing to fight against the life a stranger wants to make for you or fight for the identity another tries to take away from you. You can even fight for the right to not fight at all, but you always get to decide. You always get to choose and I’m not letting them take that away from me. I’m not an object or a plaything. I’m a person and I’m not always going to be what strangers want me to be or do what they expect me to do. I’m done with this. I’m here. I’m right here and as long as I am I get to have a say in what I fight for and I will never fight for them._

Impulse makes him reckless and common sense is far behind him as he abruptly stands up from the chair, so fast no one has time to react before he strides right up to the table and grabs the decanter the best he’s able to with tied hands. It’s made of heavy crystal. Waterford, Baccarat or an equally expensive designer house he doesn’t know or care to identify. It’s hard to think of anything through the bristling cloud of anger tensing every muscle in his body. He only has the imperative to move, to act, to do something to stop their conversation in its tracks. The decanter’s handle cracks in the clench of his hands and tiny fissures appear on the surface like lightning bolts. If he grips it any harder it’ll shatter. Before it does, he grits his teeth, sets all his strength behind his arms and, taking a leaf out of Lethe’s book, he hurls the decanter at the far wall where it explodes against the white plaster in a splattered gout of red gore and glinting shards of broken glass.

He had heard once in passing that ringing bells could exorcise spirits from a house the same way some people beat pots and pans together at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s to chase away the dross of the old and dispel unwanted energies to usher in newer, better vibes for the year to come. It’s a quaint tradition he doesn’t entirely believe and he has no bells or pots at hand, but when it came to making some noise to get someone’s attention he thinks a glass projectile could suffice just as well to dispel loose tongues.

For a wonder, it works. The Night Court freeze in their places at the table, a line of blank faces staring at him, morbidly still and silent.

_Think fast while I have their attention. Don’t hesitate, don’t fuck this up._

There’s a tipping point here, an assurance that if he doesn’t say the right thing, impress them enough with words to match his actions, he won’t soon leave here and he suspects Phil won’t fare any better either if caught.  Any choice he makes will bear consequences. He’s aware to speak or stay silent wouldn’t change circumstances in his favor. Both came with considerable risk and to do either would affect the outcome of his future in subtle but substantial ways. He’d set things in motion already; he’d made his choice. Now, he just needed to make it count.

 _Butterflies and hurricanes_ , he thinks before taking a breath he no longer needs and speaks.

“My life isn’t a free-for-all for your entertainment.,” he says and his voice is a low thrum of controlled rage. “I’m not your pawn or your doll to do with as you please. Everyone I’ve met so far seems to think they have a say in who I am or what I should do. But I’m the only one who gets to decide, I’m the only who gets to have a say in what matters to me and my life and none of you are going to take that away from me. I’m not fighting for you. I don’t want anything to do with you. This is my life and it will never coincide with a stranger’s expectations, whether it’s my family’s, my friends’ or especially yours. I may get it wrong nearly half the time I get it right, but that’s what it means to exist, that’s what it means to live. There’s nothing wrong with me and whoever I decide to be in the future, whatever I decide to do or not do will never be because of you. My life or unlife, whatever you want to call it, will go on regardless of your demands of me. I’m not your pawn to move across a board. I don’t belong to you, I don’t belong to anyone but myself. You want your blood, go get it somewhere else.”

A tide of silence rolls over the room after he finishes speaking, broken only by the slow _drip drip drip_ of spilled blood running down the filigreed scrollwork of the wall onto the floor. For a time, no one moves or speaks. George looks both quietly astonished and scared in his frozen stance behind the table. A blip of lightning outside the windows underscores the tension building in the air and the dull boom of thunder which follows punctuates it, but just when the silence reaches intolerable levels of anxious menace, Eris suddenly relaxes back in her seat and laughs as if she’d found Dan’s outburst to be the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard.

“Oh, really now. Not this again,” she says. “So much passion and wrath to then say something like that. Isn’t your life just a ‘free-for-all’ for everyone’s entertainment? It’s all on parade when one enters your name in a search engine. Every bit of it spelled out in sound clips, photos and lack luster videos. You perform and the world watches. All for entertainment.”

“It’s not how you’re making it out to be. It’s not like that at all.” Dan hesitates and reflects for a moment. “Well, not completely…”

Makhai sneers. “Sit down, boy. You’re embarrassing yourself. Accept your life is a joke and shut up.”

“I already do actually. It’s all in my twitter bio. I accept what I am; maybe you should do the same.”

The sneer on Makhai’s face instantly curdles into a thin lipped expression of cold ire. “Are you implying I’m a joke?”

“Not at all,” Dan says coolly. “I’m stating it.”

In hindsight, he thinks it’s a good thing the rage he feels numbs every other emotion and thought in his head, because if not, the sheer force of panic at watching Makhai’s eyes bleed to black pits in his face would have had him halfway to shoving himself through the iron bars over the windows like a vegetable through a mandoline. He doesn’t feel any pull of glamour this time. The deadened stare looking back at him is purely murderous. He counts it a small miracle that the dart collection on the table doesn’t suddenly find itself buried in his face, but he thinks that’s probably more to do from the way Aeacus shoots Makhai a warning glance for him to stand down.

“You have such nerve to talk back to us,” Aeacus says. “I’d have let Makhai wipe the floor with you, but your bravery, though foolish, intrigues me. Why do you continue to repudiate us? Do you really think you can simply walk away and survive in the world as you are on your own, inconstant creature that you are?”

“I’ve been doing alright so far.”

“Barely, child, barely. I don’t understand. Why do you want to go back to that life where no one really sees you except as a slate on which to write off their own deficiencies and inhibitions? Who really appreciates you as you are instead of all the insecurities and down fallings humans see in themselves? You hold the quality of self-agency in such high esteem, yet you give up that right daily to audiences of people who don’t strictly see you as a person at all. You’re a caricature to be poked and prodded and constantly compared, someone to be scrutinized as a curiosity, an interesting specimen to be dissected to see what makes you tick.”

“I think that’s more your way of doing things actually,” Dan says in a sardonic tone.

“You see things as you want them to be not as they are. Your paradigms are wrong, your approach faulty, your intentions chaotic and misplaced. Your defiance however, your potential to use the small facets of intellect you display on rare occasions, has some redemptive qualities. We can nurture these attributes-allow you to become, to flourish, to grow into the person you were always meant to be, someone far better and stronger than everything you think you’re capable of now.”

“The way _you_ want me to, according to your rules and expectations Sounds like the only ‘paradigms’ up for question here are yours.”

“We enlighten,” Aeacus says. “We grant true power and freedom to those few worthy enough to receive our gifts. Yilmaz obviously saw something in you, but we won’t abandon you to chance as she did. We welcome you as a matter of fact. We promise you an eternity of distinction and power such as no mortal will ever have in this lifetime, a seat at this table with us few who have survived history with all its bloody upheavals, coups, riots and blackmail. If you have courage enough to withstand the onslaught of the ages, then we accept you. Here, we offer you apotheosis. Leave however, and you will lose not only our protection and gifts, but you will also lose your career, your reputation, your friends, your family and all that once held importance for you. You can defy us, but will never win against us. We are many and you-” Aeacus shakes his head in the same forbearing, piteous manner. “You, boy, are only one person. One new blood with nothing to rely on, but the grace of our mercy.”

“So, fight and die, leave and die anyway or survive and face blackmail, exile and alienation. That’s not much of a choice.”

“No, it’s really not is it?” Eris flashes a small mocking smile at him and Dan stares at her for a moment of long protracted silence full of all the heat of frustrated rage boiling up in his chest. When she notices, the smile on her face falters.

“You think this is clever?” His voice throttles lower to a graveled hum like a snarl. “Just taking what you want, plundering my life, thinking this is all yours?”

Eris blinks. “It’s the story of your nation, Daniel. One would think you’d understand.”

“No. It’s a story, but it’s not _my_ story. Or at least it’s not one I care to perpetuate. All these centuries and you can’t break with tradition, acknowledge there’s something wrong with the status quo-”

“Coward!” Makhai bellows and slams the table with the flat of his hand so hard he cracks the wood with a sound like a rifle shot causing Dan to jump back. “I’ve heard this pathetic appeal before and it’s the same boring slant of a speech every time spoken by weak insufferable whelps like yourself! We’re caught in a revolving circle of vicious cycles without meaning and talking is the way of passive philosophers who enjoy bandying theories and words that amount to nothing. Action, fighting, the drama of conflict and the violence of will-only these will avail you in success and it is no different here with us. Or with _them_.” Makhai points at the rain drenched windows behind him and Dan understands he means to indicate the world at large, his audience spanning innumerable countries and continents beyond the borders of the city he called home. “You think they’ll continue to watch you for what you have to say, that they truly care a dot about who you are? No, it’s what you do, what they perceive about you, the things that are read between glances and gestures that feed their interest, not grandstanding moral quandaries that should have died with Diogenes in his tub.”

Eris raises her glass in Makhai’s direction as he continues. “You’re an entertainer. You’re well acquainted with how the game works. You’re nothing when you don’t perform, when you don’t accede to their requests and demands. They remember your name for what you do for them, for how you pique their interest. Do you think if you revealed all of who you really are, told them every detail to leave nothing for interpretation that they would care at all? They want their own reflections to stare back at them, to write their own version of you into fictions and speculations until they’ve exhausted the obsession. They crave the entertainment of you, not the reality. Why else do celebrities find their worth after they’re dead and no longer alive to contest rumors and unofficial biographies? Nothing in all these centuries has changed and it never will. The crowds roared at the gladiators in the arena and forgot them when the fight was done. No one remembered their names because of who they were, only for how well they caught the crowd’s attention and even then the world recalls precious few of all those that perished under chariot wheels and in a lion’s maw. The world is as it is and always has been and so are we and so are you. Under that simpering stature, you’re a brutal thing. What you are now only brings you closer to it. Don’t talk to us of ‘perpetuating the status quo’ when that’s all the world has ever been distinguished by since its inception-the same old rot of struggle, intrigue and blood. Don’t think you’re better than us. You who have never fought a war or healed the sick or studied long enough to be a lawyer able to help the wrongfully incarcerated, the downtrodden and the marginalized. You talk and talk but in the end all you do is fall in line to the status quo you so vehemently deny. You mongrel of a vampire. Don’t seek to lecture us before you lecture yourself.”

The heavy tide of silence comes over the room again. Dan remains rigid where he stands before the table, unable to look away from Makhai’s contemptuous, dark stare and after another long moment of a weighted pause he thinks, _well, damn…who hurt you?_

A few days ago, perhaps only a few hours ago, he might have conceded Makhai’s point. After all, who was he to say he actually made a difference in anyone’s life? That he had any relevancy or importance at all worth talking about more than any other person sharing the same place in the universe alongside him with experiences and achievements far beyond his own or who had contributed the entirety of their lives to helping others? Years ago he had just been a child playing in the tub in his grandmother’s house, slapping the bubbling foam of his bathwater into tiny geysers and making silly faces at a video camera held up to capture a moment of time in his youth to embarrass him with lighthearted nostalgia years later and in turn, grant a sense of retrospective humility over his origins, at how he had just been one more kid with his heart on his sleeve, full of dreams and ambitions and half formed ideas of who he wanted to be when he grew up. His story back then had been the same story as countless other kids his age and now was no different. Even if someone lauded him as a notable and talented raconteur amongst his peers, even if he prided himself on weaving engaging narratives worth watching on screen, he would always be aware of those who had better stories to tell, in better ways and defined by better scopes of experience than his. For every story he told with relevant themes people could identify with there were still leagues of difference between him and every member of his audience so that he could never claim superiority or distinction over them. There were many things he still tried to learn and understand and he was sure after a hundred or even a thousand years on earth, there would always be some new philosophy, perspective or idea brought to his attention that he had never considered before. He prided himself on the skills and wisdom he currently possessed, but he made no illusions about being a paragon of authority in all things or of having any long term impact in the lives of people all with their own heartaches, conflicts, triumphs and opinions to contend with to even begin considering his own.

Audiences were fickle, as Eris had said before in the car, but he didn’t fault them when he was propped up as a means of inspiration or afforded roles and distinctions he’d never asked for. And he never blamed those who decided to walk away when their interest in him had waned as interests tended to do over time. People looked for motivation and laughter to chase away the gloomier aspects of life and if their search led them to embody him as their source of encouragement and meaning, if that was to be his small contribution in life, then so be it. It was better than playing into the scheme of violence and corruption the Court lauded as a universal rule, the one Makhai so viciously claimed would never change.

“I don’t know what people see when they look at me,” he says finally. “I don’t know if they’re disappointed or amused or indifferent or maybe a bit of all of the above. And I don’t know if they’ll remember me long into the future after YouTube implodes, when houses beam the news across the walls in digital holograms and me and Phil are in a time research facility having some kind of iBrain technology implanted in our heads, but I do know there’s an audience out there full of people who find inspiration and strength in the idea of relying on compassion and levity in the face of the worst atrocities- people who are all more or less on the same page of finding something better to indulge in and enjoy because violence and malice is an element of reality they’d rather avoid than embrace. And I’d like to share my existence on this planet with people like that, who make the active choice to believe in something different than the same old tired status quo of cruelty for the sake of it. Maybe I’ll never cure cancer and I’ll never be a Nobel Laureate, but that’s not the point. I look into that digital void and see millions of people who all found entertainment, happiness and even friendship just through silly videos we uploaded to a website and it makes me feel like I’ve really done something. I have scratched at least a tiny mark in an infinitely small part of the universe. That means something. In the end the best I can hope for is that it means something good.”

He feels too hot suddenly as he stands there, burning up with the force of all the emotions he can’t convey in words or at least not in a way succinct and meaningful enough to do them any justice. He remembered feeling the same feverish mixture of heated emotions during a weekend trip to Singapore with Phil when they’d gone to see one popular tourist attraction along Marina Bay called the Supertrees, a solar powered forest of colossal metal trees housing exotic plants, orchids and bromeliads within their hollowed trunks,  created as part of a collective initiative towards conservation and horticulture. Evening saw the trees come alive with a dazzling lightshow drawing thousands of tourists to gather beneath their spectacularly lit trunks for the concert which usually followed. At the time, as Dan had sat on the floor with the rest of the crowd looking up at the trees seguing from color to color in time with the soaring orchestral piece echoing around them, he’d been given the impression of visiting the bioluminescent world of Pandora, as if he and Phil were in the middle of its jungles sat looking up at the Tree of Souls multiplied into a sprawling radiant grove, albeit with a concert of synchronized lights and music and without the present threat of thanators or banshees to worry about.

It had seemed incredible to him how such little details like examples of human ingenuity in action could give a kinder contrast to the abstract turmoil and uncertainty that life often represented, that it could somehow give meaning enough to make the very experience of living worthwhile. The fleeting time it takes to look and leave is so fragile, he had thought. In no time at all, in the matter of a few years even, this very scene could have been completely transformed or replaced entirely to become nothing but a faded memory of what had once been. Nothing lasted forever and nothing ever remained the same, but in that singular moment divorced from the persistence of time and the demands of the world, together with Phil close by his shoulder like a second shadow offering his comfortable presence and easy smile, he’d been overwhelmed by an ineffable sense of gratitude. His thoughts had filled with a warm stunned feeling he couldn’t define except to categorize it as a mixture of love and awe and appreciation to exist as he did at that moment, to be able to enjoy the incredible majesty of those meticulously constructed trees of light and to be able to share the experience of that joy with the one person he cared for most out of the many teeming crowds of tourists and locals gathered around them. Chance could have flung them anywhere, could have rearranged either of their futures towards opposite ends of the earth; could have pulled them away to differing careers and ideas in which neither of them would have ever been acquainted at all. But they _had_ met and they’d gone on to make the active choice to stand side by side in the world and their careers and in turn strangers they had never even met had celebrated this choice with boundless demonstrations of creativity and humor or by using their friendship as an example by which to connect with new friends themselves. Just as he and Phil had found themselves drawn to a magnificent tree filled with lights created by teams of enterprising architects, others were similarly drawn to their own bright contributions of creativity and amusement. He couldn’t speak for others to say what it was people saw in them, he couldn’t say what space he and Phil held in the minds of others or if they both represented something good as he hoped was the case, but the mere fact that they were surrounded by so many people who valued the accretive potential and profundity of the small things- of acts of kindness and lighthearted reminders to not take things too seriously, especially yourself, had given Dan a better sense of hope that perhaps, despite the bleak state of circumstances from a global perspective, there was still beauty and goodness to be found in the least likely of places and in the least likely of people, enough to light up the uncertain darkness with a glow more resplendent than the magnificent trees he and Phil had traveled to see.

This was the feeling he wished to cultivate in his life, this was what he’d rather make the active choice to be a part of, not Makhai’s senseless agenda of ‘struggle, intrigue and blood.’ It’s not a perspective he thinks will change in five years or one hundred and it certainly wouldn’t change now, no matter how much Makhai stared daggers at him from behind the table with that piquing reek of dread filling the air with an oppressive electric weight once again.

Dan stands his ground and stares back, his entire body bristling with defiance and reckless courage.

 _If this is how it ends, if this is where I go down, I’d rather die in the knowledge I was true to myself, no matter how strange or futile you think my choices are,_ he thinks. _I don’t belong to you and I’m nothing like you. Whatever I am now, however I choose to define this experience as the years go on or in whatever time I have left to me right now, it’ll be what I choose to make of it, regardless of your judgments or criticisms._

“You reject us without understanding us,” Aeacus says. “You think you know better when you do not.”

“I think we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that score.”

“You really believe you can survive the centuries on nothing but borrowed applause from strangers, reliant on the flimsy certainty that their love of you will grant better degrees of meaning sufficient enough to weather the long haul of eternity?”

“I don’t know, I think meaning is something we make for ourselves as we go along, so maybe it will be enough. Maybe not. But I do know anything else is better than staying here,” Dan says.

Aeacus shakes his head. “No one soul on this earth, human or otherwise, can endure existence without looking to those with more experience and wisdom than them for guidance. The tenets of your career are based on just such a principle. Why do you think so many people have found your voice to be so appealing? Because they find their own stories and voices reflected back at them in ways more enlightening and different than their own limited perspectives of the world. Daily you affect the minds of thousands of strangers and they in turn, in small ways and large ones, influence you. There is no conceivable future where they will not play a part in your life and it is the same with us. Many vampires who deny us inevitably find themselves begging for our wisdom and tutelage in the absence of finding anyone who can help them assimilate the long dark hours of the looming centuries ahead of them. We endure because we are necessary. If you were to leave now, you would only return later. When your creature desires are too feral and imposing, stronger than your previous human impulses of self-control and discipline; when you are unable to internalize the world and all its horrors with the optimistic outlook you currently value; when no hermeneutic system, be it philosophical, scientific or emotional, suffices in explaining society’s vices, absurdities and outrages; and when every sagacious excerpt from philosophers you once revered for their ability to redefine the world with some amount of order lose all meaning and worth in the face of increasingly greater upheavals and personal traumas as the years wear you down, you will find us again. You will return to us because we are your best and only connection to a world you already struggle to navigate and understand. Like it or not, we are dependent on one another. Without us, just as without your anonymous crowd of supporters, you will fail.”

Dan’s stare never wavers as he replies, “I’ll take my chances.”

“This is a fool’s errand, boy. Do you not remember your lessons of classical literature? Those who defied the gods were always struck down for their hubris.”

“But you’re not gods.” Dan laughs bitterly. “You can take their names, but you’re nothing but creatures with power playing a bad game of dress-up. You accuse me of being a bad mockup of all the things I wish I could be and if that’s true, then you’re no better. Just four vampires pretending to be bigger and badder than you really are, because you’re scared of losing everything you have.”

Makhai gives him a long, dark considering look. “So sure of yourself aren’t you?”

“Only when I’m right and I am.”

“Is that so? Enlighten me, then. I can’t wait to hear your astute deductions.”

“According to you, the Night Court in London used to be numerous. You also held uncontested power and influence to rival that of other Courts around the world. But if they’re as cunning and underhanded as the rest of you they must be keen on finding ways to increase their scope of influence to compete with you, and what better way to do it than to impose on the very people who have the most of it? They want your wealth and power. They’ve probably wanted it for a very long time now. So what would make them hesitate? What’s made them hesitate until now?”

Eris shares an uneasy glance with Aeacus as Dan’s voice continues to gather steam and confidence.

“Yilmaz. She’s always been the wild card, the kind of monster who spooks monsters. You said she used to be part of the Court, well, as a more of an antagonist apparently, but even though you said she never really counted as a member her notoriety nevertheless kept others at bay.  It wasn’t your vast numbers or ‘godlike’ reputations that made the other Courts hesitate in challenging you, it was Yilmaz, but with her prolonged absence maybe they’re starting to get ideas. If she’s no longer involved with you lot, then maybe you’re not as powerful as you seem anymore, especially given how few of you there are now. So, with her gone, what’s to stop them from closing in?”

He smiles humorlessly and points to himself. “Someone with close ties to Yilmaz herself, her own new blood. _Me_ , in other words. In her absence, I’m the wild card now. All this grandstanding, trying to threaten and entice me, but you don’t want me as a member of the Court, you want me for leverage, to make me docile so you can wave my name around like a living threat to keep the other Courts from closing in and stealing your wealth and power from right under your noses. Out of all the assets you have, I’m the most valuable one you can’t afford to lose. Otherwise you all would’ve had me killed ages ago. That’s why you won’t kill me now. And if I walk away you won’t destroy my life either, all my family, my friends and my career, because with that kind of an incentive for revenge nothing could stop me from joining another Court and siding with them against you. So I guess, in an ironic twist, it turns out despite being just a ‘mongrel of a vampire,’ I have more influence than anyone else in the room and of course you all want to own a piece of it for yourselves.”

There it is. He’s played his cards, laid the facts out neatly in their faces to prove he was the ace up his own sleeve. Aeacus was wrong. He didn’t need the Court. _They_ needed him. Without him, without the notoriety and power his blood allegedly contained, it was open season for murder, revolt and occupation as far as the other Courts around the world were concerned. Without Yilmaz’s presence to provide intimidation and only four vampires left to defend their reign in a house filled with stewards whose fair-weather allegiances would likely change according to which side seemed more likely to win, the Night Court here in London would quickly fall. Dan’s face is hot and flushed with fervid confidence. He’s certain that now their plans had been unraveled they would begin to see things _his_ way for once. He would walk out of here together with Phil and they would be allowed to resume their lives without the Court harassing and threatening them at every turn. As the lynchpin for their survival they wouldn’t dare harm him or those he cared about, not when he could easily join another Court in revenge to wage a bloody takeover. They would have no choice now except to back down. He doesn’t like the idea of the Court continuing their sordid games of manipulation with other less fortunate new bloods or humans, but that was a detail he could think about later, after he and Phil had managed to escape well beyond the borders of the house and the sprawling property it sat on. Their tense silence makes him doubly sure of his imminent success in leaving safe and sound, until Eris smiles at him with the considering look of a parent humoring their overly precocious child and suddenly he’s back to not being sure of anything at all.

“Well, look at you. Not just the pinup, like I said,” she says finally. “Yes, so clever, but let’s be clear. It’s true the reason you’re here of course is because of Yilmaz, because you carry her blood in her veins, but as Aeacus told you we barter in blood. That’s all that matters. You will fight George to prove your worth and if you lose, as you probably will, inexperienced and pacifistic as you are, then George will drain you of every last drop of blood in your veins and he will then gain the power and strength Yilmaz passed on to you. It’s as simple as that.” She swirls the blood in her wineglass and holds it up to him so he can see his bedraggled reflection in the glossy sheen of scarlet frothing back and forth against the rim. “You’re impressive, I’ll give you that, but the only thing which matters in this room, as in life, is blood and tonight we will have plenty of it. You may hate the idea as much as you hate us, but just think-if you win, you gain everything.”

“And what if I don’t want ‘everything’? What if I don’t care to win anything you’re offering,” he asks in a low tremulous tone.

“If you defeat George and you still refuse to side with us you should know your part as a bargaining chip doesn’t provide you and yours with any manner of protection. It’s true we’d rather you joined us without a fuss, we could be very beneficial for each other in many ways, but if I had to, I would take great pleasure in finding your Phil and draining him dry in front of you as you watched to make your loss that more intimately personal and once I’m finished with him I’d work to undermine your life, to do exactly as I promised in turning all your remaining friends and family away from you or to eradicate them one by one, but either way I _will_ turn the entirety of your life into an unsalvageable ruin that no one, not even outcasts and misfits like Teague, will want anything to do with you after. We will be the only family left to you, the only connection of familiarity and reference left in a world that will have turned its back on you. I told you, I’m well versed in the art of chaos and Yilmaz’s whelp or not, I will destroy you if I have to, in all senses of the word, short of killing you myself.”

“You wouldn’t- you can’t-” Dan begins to protest weakly, but Eris interrupts with a flashing leer of her fangs.

“Oh, can’t I? You think I really buy your threat of joining another Court to side against us? You, with all your principles of compassion and pooh bear sentimentality, they’d never accept you and you’d never fit in. Do you think any of the great vampire Courts are any better than us? We’re all cut from the same cloth. If you don’t like the idea of joining us then you’ll never agree to join them either, so I suggest you leave off with the empty threats, although it was a brave try while it lasted.” She laughs and shakes her head. “We’ve had ages to watch all the leaders of every country, including this one, throughout history perfect the art of destroying their people one legislative act of tyranny at a time. We’ve perfected their actions to an art. And with no one but one mewling new blood to oppose us, I’m sorry to say Daniel, for all your cleverness and smart tongue, you really don’t stand a chance. Why else do regimes such as ours endure for so long and continue to live on in infamy? Because no one ever really thinks they stand a chance against people like us, not when they are so weak and so afraid of what true power looks like. So, in the interest of avoiding a losing battle should you defy us, I suggest you fight for our favor rather than our rancor.”

“Of course, you could always forfeit to George,” Makhai chimes in dryly. “He’d make a better member of the Court than you anyway. So I suppose it depends on how much you want to live. You value your illusion of choice so much, so choose. Decide to fight to live or surrender and die.”

 _No, this doesn’t make sense_ , Dan thinks frantically. _They’re bluffing. They have to be. I mean, if it’s so important what’s stopping them from killing me right here and now and taking my blood for themselves instead of letting George do it first?_

As soon as the question enters his head, the answer dawns on him in the form of a vivid mental image of a pack of wolves savagely fighting over the same scrap of meat- all of them doing more damage to each other in the long run of trying to get the biggest piece down their throats. For the Court whose numbers were already thin as it was, it was safer and more efficient to pick someone else to share power with rather than fight over it amongst themselves at the expense of killing each other off. But given their sly and secretive natures he’s certain they wouldn’t settle for sharing power for long. He remembers Teague comparing the Court to an episode of Game of Thrones with their Machiavellian acts of power play and dominance and he thinks more than likely what would happen is that, if George were to win, then perhaps Eris or maybe Makhai, might pull him aside later to strike up a closer friendship with him in private, to gain his trust, ply him with money, gifts and guilty pleasures until one day, when George was comfortable enough in his position to let down his guard, they’d exploit the opportunity to kill George and take his blood for themselves without the need to fight over it publicly. Eris had already confessed to getting rid of three other members of the Court after they’d ‘outgrown their use.’ She’d probably use the same excuse about killing George too if she had the chance. And what could the others do after the fact except go along with it? Even if in the end, only one of them would walk with the distinction of having Yilmaz’s blood, their numbers would ultimately remain the same and they would have all the leverage they needed to intimidate the other Courts enough to stay away.

_That’s why Eris made that remark before about the others being annoyed by the idea of her trying to secretly influence me to side with her, because whoever I choose to grow close with will more than likely have the best advantage to kill me unawares later for my blood. It’s like dodging cameras at private events at VidCon, everyone wants to have a go, to secretly claim a piece of me for themselves better than what everyone else is able to get just for the distinction of my name and my face and this time I don’t have the advantage of a manager to warn the Court off with a pointed stare._

Dan would call it a clever game of chess, except from his perspective it seemed more like Russian roulette, one with a bullet in every chamber. In the elaborate game the Court had created for him to play, he was set up to lose no matter what he did. If he lost the fight with George then he died; if he won and stayed here, he’d forever have to watch his back against them trying their luck to kill him later and if he escaped they would see to it that everyone he knew and cared about would pay the consequences of his defiance for him, regardless of his reputation as Yilmaz’s chosen.

_The only sure way to win against them is to destroy them, but just how am I supposed to do that??_

His panic must show on his face because Eris nods with a sympathetic lilt to her expression. “Yes, you see now. It’s better to go along with what we ask of you. It’s much easier that way, even if the fight to follow won’t be easy at all.”

Aeacus nods in agreement. “Yes, and what we ask of you now is to fight. A room vote then, as a formality to be sure we’re all in accord. Who stands in favor?”

Lethe looks up, startled from her ongoing jigsaw of broken glass. “Oh, another room vote?”

“Yes, dear, a real one this time,” Eris says as she raises her hand in favor. “A fight to determine the best candidate to share our place at this table. A challenge, if you will. Dan vs. George. No all or nothing’s, no time outs. Only sudden death.”

“Oh, that’s right. I remember now. Well, I’m in favor as long as they’re not too loud about it.” Lethe quickly raises her hand along with Eris and Makhai follows suit.

Pleased with this outcome, Aeacus turns to George who continues to look ahead with the same distantly focused stare. “You have your opponent before you. You’ve already heard the stakes. You know the prize. Do you understand the terms as they’ve been stated?”

“I do,” George says and the vehemence of his tone makes Dan take a step back from the table.

“Wait a minute-” he falters and does a quick double take from George back to the rest of the Court. Things are suddenly happening much too fast. He needs more time to think, to find another way out of this situation that didn’t entail him participating in a fight he had no interest being a part of, but Aeacus continues interrogating George as if he were reading out the terms of a contract, one with an irrevocable clause.

“There are no limits to what weapons you may use or improvise. No holds barred and no time limit save of course for the natural onset of morning. However, I trust it won’t take you that long.”

“It won’t.” The vehemence of George’s tone doesn’t change even as Dan says again, a little louder to, “wait a minute-hold on.”

“In the event of your triumph you will no longer serve us,” Aeacus goes on speaking over Dan’s protests. “You will be as one of us. Do you pledge your fealty then, to uphold our laws and practices, to sit with us, dine with us and become one of us not only in action but in thought as well?”

George nods, back stiffly straight, his stare intense and unblinking. “I do.”

“Very well then. Have at it.” Aeacus gestures at Dan with a curt downward wave of his right hand like a conductor signaling an orchestra to commence the preparatory beat.

Finally, George’s half-mast stare refocuses its gaze directly on Dan as he slowly begins to walk from behind the table with an even purposeful stride and it’s the familiar look of every bully in the old Forest School who had ever approached him with purely aggressive intentions.

“George, think about this.” Dan tries to keep his voice level and calm as he backs away. “I don’t want to do this. Neither do you.”

“I told you before, it doesn’t matter what I want. It’s just what I need.” George shakes his head and continues walking. “It’s as I said, they mess with a person’s life just enough to make it so it’s impossible to live in peace, not with them shuffling the pieces to your disadvantage every time.” He begins to slowly unbutton his blazer, methodically working down the seam with one hand. “People always get screwed over by those in power, those with more money and more prestige who have the ability to keep their heads above water while stepping on the shoulders of everyone else beneath them. I always thought having a chance at breathing was better than drowning and now I’m being given that chance.”

Dan backs up into his chair and nearly trips over it onto the floor. “No, their system is rigged. You’re not being given a chance and you know that. If you win, you’ll never really win.”

“It’s _all_ rigged, Dan.” George slips off his blazer and places it in a neat folded bundle on the table. He begins to work on his shirt sleeves next, unbuttoning the cuffs and rolling each one up to the elbow. “Unless you’re somebody you’re always nobody, always fair game to someone else with the means to make your life miserable. All of life is a rigged game and the Court is no exception. They take Orwell’s memory hole to heart here. Everything exists for their convenience alone, to make them function more efficiently and all signs of contradictions, all dissidents and troublemakers, are eliminated as if they never existed in the first place. Unless you’re an equal or a formidable threat you’ll end up losing every time.”

“So be a threat. Defy them! Resist! Tell them to fuck off!”

George shakes his head again and finishes rolling up his left sleeve. He then starts to dip his shoulders up and down to loosen the muscles. “Nothing will change if I do. If it’s not you tonight, then it’ll be someone else to take your place. Someone else who’ll get to fight for the position as the most powerful member of the Court, someone who’ll get to earn the right to be everything they want to be and do everything they want to do without restrictions. And if it’s not you, then let it be me. I’ve waited long enough for the opportunity. I’m not letting it pass me by.”

“George- please, come on.” Dan puts his bound hands out before him, palms forward, in a warding plea. “Think about this. Remember what I said. Out there is an entire world full of possibilities to live your life as authentically as you please alongside people who are all trying to do the same, the kind of people who don’t deal in greed and malice like the Court does. Out there, you can be everything you want to be, but in here, even if you’re not wearing that uniform anymore you’ll never be anything in their eyes but a lackey. Just one more member of the domestic staff brought on to do their bidding, to be only what they want you to be. If that’s the opportunity you’re looking for it’s a pretty shit one.”

George hesitates, hands fumbling at his neck as he starts to loosen his collar.

“Think about it.” Dan holds his stare, willing the sincerity of his voice to act as a better tool of persuasion than any glamour. “Maybe one person alone against the Court is terrible odds and maybe two isn’t that great a difference either, but it’s better than facing them alone. It’s better than being forced to fight each other for their sake, not when we could fight them together.”

It seems like his words are getting through or at least they’re making enough of an impact to have stopped George in his tracks. He doesn’t look so sure of himself anymore and his hands tremble minutely at his neck, frozen in the act of undoing his collar as he considers the option of facing the Court together with Dan instead of facing off against each other. A faint corrosive smell of burning tinder and plastic begins to seep into the air and Dan’s not sure if this is merely the scent of George’s harried circumspection leaking through his pores or if it might just be the same sickly reek of the Court mingled with the scent of the crackling blaze in the fireplace. It lingers in a small, oppressive cloud around them and Dan tries not to choke and ruin the moment with a fit of coughing as he waits to hear George’s answer. He’s beginning to think, ‘ _maybe we can still walk out of here alive. Together we still have a chance_ ,’ but then his heart sinks like a stone in deep water as George's hands finish the work of loosening his and his stare takes on a hardened look of grim purpose with no room for appeal. Once he’s unhooked the first two buttons of his shirt, he lets his hands hang limp at his sides, but his fingers slowly flex into rigid claws, relaxing and clenching in anticipation of the battle ahead.

“I’m sorry.” George speaks in a tone of quiet finality. “I’m not holding back.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s been a struggle to write this and finally finish it. So much has happened over the past few months that actually finishing this seemed impossible at times and other times I nearly took it down completely, but it ultimately meant too much for me to abandon it or delete it. I’d spent a lot of time with this story in trying to make something as meaningful as how I’ve always personally viewed the world Dan and Phil created, something good and engaging and profound. I hope I succeeded at least a little bit in conveying that here and I want to thank every returning reader and every new one for following this story for as long as you have despite the long silence between updates and thank you for taking the time to read it in the first place. Despite everything, I enjoyed writing this and it feels like such a relief to be able to share the end of this story with you. I hope it manages to be a satisfying and entertaining read.  
> I do have plans for an epilogue to tie up a few loose ends, but in terms of the main story, this chapter and the next one are the last.
> 
>  
> 
> **  
> **  
> Notes on the story:  
>   
> 
>  **Formatting:** When writing the sequence for when Dan and Phil fall under the glamour Makhai and Ashton induce, I was trying to play around with the physical structure of the text to give the reader that disorienting feeling as well for better immersion. Everything looked evenly aligned at first, but when I previewed it, the formatting became skewed and no matter what I did to try to fix it, it never perfectly lined up as I’d wanted it to, but I hope the effect still somewhat translated.
> 
>  **Naming the Court:** I imagined each member of the Court taking the names of deities or personified spirits as a mark of pride and to distinguish themselves from those below their rank. It also helped me in deciding on their personalities and playing around with details to grant them more depth. (which I hope ended up making them at least a bit more interesting and engaging in the context of the story.) I actually wanted to go into further detail. There was more backstory to Eris initially where her character and origins played a larger role in her schemes, especially in the context of Makhai’s comments about her working with another Court from her native Japan to overtake the Court in London, but it came to be a plot point which didn't work well in Exogenesis Symphony’s established narrative. Even if I thought I could have included it somehow, it needed more time for me to develop in a well-rounded, thoughtful way which would have dragged the story on for much longer than it probably needed to be and would have also further delayed posting these chapters here.
> 
>  **A quick rundown of the Night Court:**  
>  **Aeacus** -was one of the three judges in Hades, more specifically the one charged with the task of judging the souls of Europeans upon entry to the underworld.  
>  **Lethe** \- named for the spirit of oblivion or the river in Hades whose waters cause spirits to forget their former lives  
>  **Eris** \- named for the goddess of discord, conflict and rivalry  
>  **Makhai** \- named for the spirits of battle and violence  
> (in a strange universe where this story is made into a film, I could see Anthony Padilla playing Makhai or being Dan's darker, menacing illusory double from the vision Makhai makes Dan see. like a tongue in cheek throwback to his collab with Dan.)
> 
> Other than basing him on the personified spirit of battle, Makhai is also loosely based on the Roman senator, Lucius Sergius Catilina or **Catiline.** (his Wikipedia page has a good rundown on his life history if you’d like to read more about him. If this were a true novel I would have gone more in depth with him and his story as well, explaining how he ended up in the Court after the ancient battle which was supposed to have killed him, but for the purpose of not making this story much longer than it already is or diverging wildly from a plot that’s meant to focus solely on Dan and Phil, I had to go with an abridged version.) There are written rumors about Catiline drinking blood in a ritual (in some stories it’s a sacrificed child, in others it’s that of an animal) but when I was researching Roman senators and army generals to base Makhai on, that small detail sold me on linking the two together. 
> 
> **Dan’s speech to the Court:** “I look into that digital void and see millions of people who all found entertainment, happiness and even friendship just through silly videos we uploaded to a website and it makes me feel like I’ve really done something. I have scratched at least a tiny mark in an infinitely small part of the universe. That means something. In the end the best I can hope for is that it means something good.” is taken from his concluding words in tabinof.


	11. Resistance: Part II

 

If you missed Part One of this chapter please click: [Here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3565871/chapters/26652504)

 

❧

 

The walk up the long flight of stairs from the basement to the door above is a short one. In less than five minutes, Phil, Susan and Teague (with Lucy flopping bonelessly over his shoulder) arrive at the upper floor, allowing Phil his first real glimpse at the house’s interior and his first thought on stepping out from the smoke clogged stairwell is that he doesn’t like it. Not a bit. He thinks it smells old and stuffy to match the look of its décor, like being stuck in a museum where every exhibit was constructed with the distinct purpose of belittling the observer by way of demonstrating everything they could never have or achieve. Everything is too serious and overly pretentious, even the oil portraits on the walls seem to look back at him with sneering, officious expressions and if the house had a voice Phil thinks its foundations would speak in a tone suffused with Ashton’s contemptuous timbre to tell him he doesn’t belong here. It’s just as well he doesn’t want to belong. He just wants to get moving towards wherever Cassandra’s gallery is supposed to be, find Dan and then go back home to a flat where the atmosphere was more vibrant and agreeable and less self-absorbed.

He gets a whiff of the fire boiling away not too far off from the floorboards underneath their feet and it smells mildly like a campfire, a spiced woody aroma he usually enjoyed, but the pleasant tang of burning wood is spoiled by the harsher overlay of gas and melting plastic. It’s only going to grow stronger and by the time the powerfully corrosive stink overwhelms the rest of the house, with the fire itself probably having already breached the basement to devour the first floor, Phil knows by then it’ll be too late to leave. They need to be on their way and quickly. Teague picks up on the frantic energy of his impatience and nods in silent agreement that, yes, haste was of the essence. He hunkers down by the closed basement door and allows Lucy to slide off his shoulder. She lands softly, in a limp bundle on the floor, limbs haphazardly arranged with her right arm slumping over her face in a strangely comical pose of someone dabbing in their sleep.

“Out like a light, this one,” Teague says as he straightens up again. “But not for long. With any luck, by the time she wakes up we’ll be long gone from this area and if we’re luckier still, we’ll be halfway to leaving this place completely with Dan.”

“Right. We just have the problem of figuring out where he is and how we’re meant to break him out. He was meant to meet us in the basement, but I think it’s safe to say he’s not going to be here any time soon and with the basement itself currently turning into charbroil bits we’re left to find him and get out of here some other way.” Susan looks down the long hallway to where it ends at an intersection of other longer, ambling corridors. “This place is immense. How do we know which floor or which room he’s in?”

“I might be able to help with that,” Phil says. “We need to find a room called Cassandra’s Gallery. Apparently, once we’re there we’ll be able to find a door that’ll lead us to Dan.”

Teague stares at him. “I mean, that’s a great lead to be getting on with and I’m not complaining, but how do you know for sure?”

Phil hesitates, uncertain if this was the right time to reveal his unexpected source, but all his energy for being able to make up a white lie on the spot has been exhausted with his previous interrogation and he decides it better to go for broke, say the name and get it over with.

“It was Yilmaz. She told me.”

A mixture of emotions runs across Teague’s face all at once, most of which resemble consternation and shock. He looks faintly green as well and Phil thinks it a small miracle Teague doesn’t faint away where he stands to join Lucy in her unsettled stupor on the floor.

“You…spoke with Yilmaz? Here? ‘ _The_ ’ Yilmaz?”

“Er, the only one I’m aware of.” Phil smiles apologetically as Teague blanches an even sicklier shade of green.

“But how did-I mean, why would she-she’s never offered-”

“Why would she offer to help?” Phil ventures a guess to finish Teague’s parade of cut off sentences and shrugs. “I don’t know either. She said she wasn’t helping, only instigating. I still don’t know why she gave me the information she did. When she appeared behind me I thought she’d kill me at first if I’m honest. The mask she was wearing is apt to give me nightmares for a year, but she was actually-well, she was quite pleasant. She ended up giving me a tarot reading after I found her ring in the tunnel and gave it back to her.”

“You what.” At this point Teague resembles a bug eyed goldfish, one whose tank water hadn’t been changed in three months. It’s clearly too much information for him to process at one time and they don’t have the luxury of standing around until Phil could explain the details better at length.

 _We’ll make it a story time video_ , Phil thinks, amused. _Maybe save it for a liveshow topic when the questions run a bit thin and repetitive. It could go on my side channel later with the title, ‘Creepy Vampire Encounter’ with ‘Nearly Died!!’ in parentheses and a smaller caption of ‘not clickbait!’ for good measure._

“She spoke with you- she knew why you were here, probably knew I was here as well and she just-let you go,” Teague says wonderingly.

Susan gives a short laugh. “I’m gathering this Yilmaz you both keep going on about isn’t exactly friendly then?”

Teague shakes his head. “You don’t know the half of it. She’s unpredictable. You never know what her intentions are until you have her fangs in your throat or your head separated from your body. If we get out of here I’ll tell you more about it later.” He turns back to Phil, his expression wide eyed with awe this time instead of shock. “You’re incredibly lucky she didn’t kill you. Or turn you. Either way is a bad deal when you’re dealing with her.”

“You keep saying that, but you’ve never said exactly why you’re so wary of her. Or resentful.”

Teague frowns. “I’d have thought her letting the Court kill my friend when she could have prevented it was explanation enough.”

“It is,” Phil says quickly, “but she seemed to hint there was more to the story than just that and I was curious.” He shakes his head. “No, forget I said that. It’s not my business and this isn’t the place to be asking anyway. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”

Teague looks away in silence for a long moment and as Susan glances between the two of them inquisitively, his expression segues into one of resigned surrender. He opens his mouth and seems about to give Phil the definitive answer to his question, but the distant thud of something heavy falling over in the basement, perhaps a wooden beam giving way or another piece of furniture succumbing to the flames, steals away whatever confession he’d been holding on the tip of his tongue. Instead he sighs and gives a noncommittal shrug of his shoulders.

“It’s…complicated, to turn a cliché of a phrase,” he says. “But now’s not the time. Detailed back stories are usually better received when they’re not told in the middle of an impending disaster anyway. When we get out of this, when we’re safe, I promise I’ll tell you everything, but unless we want an anticlimactic explosive ending to our own story we have to get moving."

“Sounds good to me.” Susan looks at the basement door apprehensively and then down towards the end of the hall to the rest of the corridors leading off into three directions. “So, as we can’t exactly ask for directions, which way do we go then? Straight ahead? Left or right?”

“Not straight ahead.” Teague shakes his head. “I can sense a small group of people not too far off in that same direction. Dunno if they’re stewards or just party guests, but they’re definitely not human and if I had to bet, I’d wager the entire value of their liquor stock downstairs they’re definitely not friendly. They could always veer off and go somewhere else, but it’s more likely if we kept going that direction and they found us, we’d get bottlenecked with nowhere to go but back the way we came and we’d never run that fast in time to escape.”

“To the left then,” Susan says at the same time that Teague says, “We should go right.”

They hesitate, unsure of how to handle their awkward impasse when Phil quickly suggests the best diplomatic go-to he can think of for settling differences. “Maybe you both could rock, paper, scissors it? We don’t have time for best two out of three, so one try and whoever wins that’s the way we go.”

If they find his proffered resolution strange, they set to it anyway without further question or comment, both of them sticking out their left hand in a bunched fist towards the other and raising it in time with the beat as they count down to three in unison. On “ _three!_ ” Susan reveals a flat hand for ‘paper.’ Teague keeps his hand in a fist for ‘rock’ and laughs when Susan darts forward to cover it with her palm for the win.

“Was always rubbish at these types of games. Fine then, left it is.”

They set off at a fast clip in that direction with Teague leading their entourage forward past numerous other oil paintings depicting aristocratic lords and ladies whose eyes seem to follow their progress with eerie precision. It gives the pervasive feeling of being watched, hunted like animals in a forest. An involuntary shudder trickles down Phil’s spine and he swallows hard as he tries to keep from staring back at the portraits tracking his every move. The corridor is full of closed doors and shadowed niches which Phil passes with some unease, uncertain what could be lurking in the darkness ready to jump out and surprise them unawares. He takes some consolation from having Teague’s uncanny sense of perception at their disposal to alert them of a potential threat, but he still worries if perhaps another powerful vampire like Yilmaz might fly below the radar of his abilities and might be watching them now in silence just like the paintings on the wall. Teague had said she enjoyed setting things in motion to then stand back to watch the show and he wonders if that’s what she was doing now, enjoying their aimless trot through the house, waiting to see if they would manage to find the gallery and consequently Dan in time to escape with their lives. Maybe that was why she hadn’t given him a better clue of where to find the so called ‘Cassandra’s gallery,’ because she wanted to see how well he could work with the meager details he’d been given thus granting her a more entertaining performance to enjoy by way of his struggle. It’s a bleak thought and he tries to put it out of his mind and focus instead on trying to figure out where they need to go.

If the basement room had been impressive the house is even more so. Phil has no idea how anyone could do a proper tidy up in here. It’s a sprawling maze of corridors, staircases and open lounges filled with antique tomes, classical Greek statues, gold trimmed furniture, processions of huge ornamental amphorae, polished marble floors in which he can see his own reflection like a mirror and chandeliers in various impressive designs filled with sparkling showers of diamonds suspended on golden chains. But it’s the large square aquarium built into the middle of the marble floor of the lounge they cautiously walk into that grabs his attention most out of all the menagerie of expensive décor and knickknacks around them. He immediately finds it incredible and he can hardly believe what he’s seeing as he walks over the tempered glass to watch the graceful silhouette of a nurse shark glide through the soft blue lighting of the water right under his feet.

“That’s fancy,” he murmurs, to which Teague dryly replies, “that’s overkill.”

“What- you mean you wouldn’t want a floor aquarium in your house if you could afford it,” Susan asks as she stares mesmerized at the tiny school of tropical colored fish which dart quickly out of view.

“No. If anything I like my fish al fresco, you know, in a pond outside in a garden, not for me to walk all over unless I’m in some public Aquarium where I can learn about them instead of showing them off like a prat.” Teague shakes his head. “Maybe I’m just biased because it’s the Court doing it, but it’s not my thing.”

“I don’t know. I like it,” Phil says. It reminds him of a trip to Singapore he’d taken with Dan when they’d visited an aquarium there and had walked through corridors filled with gorgeous shades of blue and green light cast off from the various exhibits of sea life greeting them around every corner.  It had felt like visiting a different universe and as Dan had paused to give a soft snorting laugh at a stingray pressing its strange flat face against the glass, Phil had thought he’d very much like to have something like this in his own house someday, a little contained world of blue light and peaceful water filled with vibrant fish. Dan had agreed with him, smiling in pensive reflection while the ambient light had glided across his face in rippling bands to match the movement of the water. It seemed as if he were clearly envisioning it and he’d even gone so far as to suggest how nice it might be to live in a place with some manner of indoor pond filled with koi- “maybe even a fish tank in the floor,” Dan had further remarked and although his tone had been half joking they’d both considered it an interesting idea to earmark for a future in which they could manage to make it a reality. “Someday, we will,” Phil had said, “in some forever home we can remodel and design the way we want. I think that’d be nice.”

Dan hadn’t immediately replied to that, but the smile on his face had grown a fraction larger. It was an idealistic assumption to think they could afford a house in London- even with a stream of income which dwarfed the paychecks of their Manchester days- much less afford a home in which they could construct an indoor tank between the floorboards, but the presumption came with the clear implication that Phil expected to live in a future where Dan remained a consistent presence, one he’d happily consider moving into a ‘forever home’ with in the first place. Flats were one thing, but a place to call their own, a place truly theirs for the keeping without landlords or leases to worry about; where they could personalize the rooms and walls without fear of losing their deposit; a place where they could be as loud and imaginative as they pleased when it came to filming or renovations- that kind of forever home was quite another thing altogether. It implied a greater burden of responsibility, an unspoken agreement that they would both shoulder their fair share of everything that entailed the proper upkeep of a home when they couldn’t call a landlord to sort out their problems for them, but Phil had thought if they’d managed to survive a medley of problems featuring leaking gas pipes, finicky kitchen faucets and a visitation from their neighbor the ‘Holy Mother’ throughout their tenancy in Manchester and London, then living in a true house didn’t seem too great an issue.

 _It’d be like leveling up_ , he’d thought, _getting ourselves to the next tier of our lives where we could be at the right point to take on the next challenge of a house and taking it one day at a time like we’ve always done. We never got a manual for how to manage YouTube when we first started out or one for how to muddle through life in general on our own, but I think we’ve done alright for ourselves so far. Maybe one day, when we’re ready, we can buy the kind of house we’ve always talked about wanting. And if it comes with a massive indoor fish tank so much the better._

 He doesn’t imagine a home near as lavish or opulent as the one he’s standing in right now, but then his wildest billionaire dreams had always involved rooms turned into giant ball pits and indoor rollercoasters in lieu of staircases, not so much styling his estate into a full-scale replica of the Louvre. When it came to interior design he’s not sure Dan might agree to installing an 80 mph drop to reach every floor, but maybe the ball pit would be an easier concession they both could agree on. Whatever house they might come to own in the future, however they decided to personalize and design it, he wanted it to have character, a warm, personable atmosphere, something not so coldly aloof and alienating like the house he currently stood in where the sharks swimming by under his feet seem to be placed there more as a threat than to inspire awe. He wanted the antithesis of everything this house and its occupants stood for. In short, he supposed what he wanted amounted to everything that Dan stood for, someone a bit clumsy but nice and a bit loud but kind, who despite his protracted musings about the uncertainties of life and universal purpose, was rather hopeful and lovely and altogether welcoming. Phil doesn’t think that will change even now given the new, unforeseen circumstances of Dan’s recent transformation and he doesn’t want to give the Court any more time to try and prove him wrong.

 _We have a right to create the kind of future we want_ , Phil thinks. _A happy one, a good one. We’re going to do it. No matter what happens next, that’s all I want to think about. Not that we might make it happen, but that we ‘will.'_

“You lost something down there?” Teague abruptly appears beside him in the transparent reflection of the glass and Phil startles back to himself, only just now realizing he’d been staring down into the tank’s blue depths without blinking for a good few minutes.

“No, sorry. Just lost in thought.” Phil smiles wanly.

“Any other time I’d let you wander as you pleased, but with a literal fire lit right under our arses we need to keep the woolgathering to a minimum.”

“Right. Sorry.” He glances once more at the receding silhouette of the nurse shark as it swims down and out of sight, thoughts of forever homes, Singapore and Dan taking center stage in his mind as he absentmindedly walks forward without looking until he collides into Teague, nearly bowling them both over to the floor.

“Oh no, I-” Phil begins to profusely apologize, but Teague gestures frantically with one hand and hisses back at him to “ _shhhh!_ ” He doesn’t have to ask the reason for Teague’s sudden pause because as soon as his mind shakes off the last traces of his pleasant Singapore idyll to catch up to the present moment again he hears the cause loud and clear- the sound of approaching footsteps and voices coming closer and closer to the lounge where they’re currently stood transfixed over the aquarium in the floor.

“This way!” Susan darts across the lounge to a nondescript set of double doors and before Teague can protest for her to wait, Phil immediately sets off after her as the voices take on the clear cadence of speech instead of indecipherable burbles of noise. If they stopped to think about which way to go again the voices and the people they belonged to would soon find themselves right at the entryway of the lounge, catching them all out within seconds. Teague appears to concur with this unspoken thought because he tails right after Phil as he pushes through the doors in a hurry, leading them on into a darkened, spacious area immediately recognizable as a kitchen from the many brass pots and pans hanging in neat rows from a pot rack suspended over a workstation in the middle of the room. It’s not as lavish or extravagantly decorated as the rest of the house, instead appearing more utilitarian and modern in design with walk-in freezers large enough to park a lorry and still have space left over, enormous stainless steel ovens built into marble countertops lined with dozens of drawers and cupboards with the same finished polish of silver steel along with wide basined sinks spacious enough to accommodate the many blue banded porcelain plates stacked in neat towers along the counters.

Phil notices these details at a glance, more concerned with getting as much as space as possible between him and the doors they’d just come through in case the small crowd of people decided to wander into the kitchen as a short cut on their way to wherever they were headed. He can’t see another way out of the kitchen and there aren’t many good places to hide unless they decided to recreate Jurassic Park and accordion themselves into the small cupboard spaces under the counters. In his haste, Phil briefly considers the idea, but he can’t imagine fitting the entire length of his body there unless he managed an incredible feat of painfully complex yoga that would leave him resembling a crushed pretzel afterwards. Instead, they scramble as one towards the back of the room and hunker below the perimeter of a small kitchen island apparently used to chop vegetables from the basket of fresh carrots and broccoli lying on top of a large maple cutting board ready for use. From the small bits of sheared carrot skin left in the small grooves of the wood grain, missed by the person responsible for clearing after the chefs, it had already been in use fairly recently. Now that Phil had come to a stop the faint aroma of caramelized onions and stir fry sauce left over from a dinner which apparently had been prepared only a few hours before their arrival wafts its way down his nose. ( _Sweet bell peppers, melted brown sugar, sizzling soy sauce, crisp sugar snap peas and perfectly fluffy warm white rice_ , Phil thinks as he parses each scent for its source.) He’s not sure if he’s got the flavor profiles exactly right, but it smells heavenly enough to be accurate as some distinctly pleasant meal comprised of a balanced salty sweetness he could definitely go for right now.  It’s a residual trace, a barely detectable odor that all too soon segues back into the stuffy primeval stink pervading the rest of the house, but it’s sufficient to make Phil’s stomach rumble with a deep resonant growl, so loud Teague and Susan slowly turn their heads to look at him.

He smiles sheepishly and shrugs his shoulders in a way to silently communicate, _guess there’s nothing like a crisis to make you hungry, right?_

Susan and Teague stare back at him with matching amused expressions of _,_ 'you have a problem _.'_

The voices in the lounge, a group of four people from the distinctive pitch and treble of their conversation, becomes louder and Phil cringes lower to the floor, waiting with bated breath to see if the double doors to the kitchen might suddenly swing open. If the group did come through, if they were vampires as Phil suspected they must be from how Teague gestures at him with a slow wave of his hand to calm down, probably indicating how his heart was beating much too fast in a detectable drumbeat of a sound that any vampire in the vicinity would be able to hear, it would be far too many people for Teague to take on at once. They’d worried about being bottlenecked in a corridor with no escape, but in no time at all they’d found themselves boxed into a worse situation, literally between a rock and a hard place. _Or between a kitchen island and a counter_ , Phil thinks. Only the slim edge of chance would help them now. No eerily accurate tarot readings or a game of rock, paper, scissors could help turn the odds in their favor and the suspenseful tension of wondering just how fate might play its hand sours Phil’s cravings, turning his stomach over with a sickening lilt of nauseous dread this time instead of hunger.

Ribald laughter followed by an unintelligible quip resounds close to the kitchen. In the thin strip of light partitioning the doors Phil sees the murky shadows of figures milling around the lounge. Their footfalls echo off the tiled walls around them in an uncomfortable surround sound effect. Someone else makes a remark and the entire group breaks out into bellowing laughter which the brass pots overhead amplify into a tinny racket. They grow closer still. Their shadows loom like a black cloud completely eclipsing the light between the doors and Phil’s hands grow numb. He can feel Teague tense up into a tight coil of nerves beside him, ready to spring out in a last ditch attempt to ambush the group before they could launch their own offensive. Phil thinks the look of his face alone would be enough to intimidate them. His eyes are noticeably darker, the irises almost completely suffused with black and the corners of his mouth are pulled back into a cheerless grin more like a snarl, baring his grit teeth and the full length of his curved fangs. Phil thinks if he were capable of it Teague might be growling low in his throat like a wolf on high alert. Next to him, he sees Susan do a double take at Teague’s face, her eyes lingering for a long unsettled moment on the fangs in his mouth, her mouth forming a small slack ‘O’ in reserved awe or fear, Phil can’t tell which, before she shakes her head as if to rouse herself from too many troubled thoughts and refocuses her attention on the doors.

The footsteps are so loud now it sounds as if they’re already in the kitchen, but just as Phil’s breath freezes in his lungs, expecting the doors to the kitchen to be thrown wide at any second, their footsteps begin to recede and the thin slat of light appears once more between the doors as they cross the rest of the way out of the lounge into the corridor beyond. Their conversation, an ongoing study of a dirty joke Phil can’t entirely understand, recedes into the distance until it fades into a blurred warble of sound and then drops off into silence. They wait a few minutes more before daring to straighten up from their hiding place, Phil’s nerves stretched to the limit while he hopes chance won’t decide to give them a nasty surprise at the last minute with the group suddenly returning just as they thought it was safe to leave. But no one returns and the silence remains. The group has moved on to take their jokes elsewhere, oblivious to both the group of intruders hiding in the kitchen and the blaze gaining speed and size in the basement. Susan dares to stand up first on unsteady legs and move away from the cover of the island with Teague and Phil following her in quick succession. They pause for a moment in a tight circle, staring at each other in blank disbelief before Susan breaks down into a stifled snort of nervous laughter.

“Well, that was close,” she mutters in a low voice when she recovers. “Good thing they weren’t looking to make a fry-up.” She gives another snorting laugh at that and shakes her head. “What do vampires need with a kitchen anyway?”

“Human staff, human guests- they need to eat too.” Teague shrugs. “Besides, I think they just like to watch people cook. God knows I’ve wasted hours on YouTube watching people make dishes I’ll never eat. Kinda like the way some guys who have no interest in putting on makeup watch makeup tutorials because it’s mesmerizing.”

“Oh, you do that too?” Phil stares at him in genuine interest.

“Yeah, you kidding? All those beauty vloggers with their highlighters and contouring- bloody fascinating really. Although, when they do that eyeliner thing it fucks with my head something terrible. You know- when they run it right over the waterline and they look an inch away from skewering their eyeball?” Teague shudders. “Makes the Saw movies look tame by comparison. I’d try it myself, because the smoky eye effect looks sick, you know? But you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a pencil to my eye like that.”

“I know! Me and Dan tried it once with this ‘Punk Edits’ video we filmed once and it was terrible,” Phil says and behind them Susan rolls her eyes and gives a forbearing sigh as she moves off to inspect an open cupboard door.

“‘Punk Edits?’ What- you mean you and Dan with piercings, tattoos and rousing sing-alongs to Misfits and Joy Division? How’d I miss _that?_ ”

“Er, well, it was something more like the best temporary tattoos and fake piercings Amazon had to offer just to emulate the look. We tried eyeliner to complete it and it was alright, but I’d rather not have to use it again if I’m honest-” Phil gets cut short as a small blurred object finds itself on a collision course with his head and his hands instinctively fly up to catch it before it can connect. He manages to grab it in time, with a crinkling racket of squashed foil between his fingers and he looks down in surprise to see a snack sized packet of salt and vinegar crisps clutched in his hands.

“Don’t know if you’re keen on them, but that’s all I could find in a pinch,” Susan says as she nods her head towards the open cupboard door to indicate the several other bags of salt and vinegar crisps inside. “Figured you at least had a minute to cram a few down before we end up in another tight situation like this one where we don’t need your stomach rumbling like a plane on takeoff to give us away.”

“Oh, thanks! These are one of my favorites actually.” Phil quickly works to tear a corner of the packet open and crowd a few bites into his mouth. The flavor instantly zings across his tongue, incredibly good, made with a perfect blend of tangy and salty and a delicate texture that’s incredibly satisfying to crunch between his teeth. He eats them with the relish of someone who’d never eaten crisps before in his life and he thinks half of what makes them taste so good must be the stress of what they’d just escaped, the way people who survived great traumas indulged in comfort food right after, as if a heaping of ice cream or pizza carried with it special properties able to ease the mind and soothe the heart.

 _Or it’s probably some chemical reaction thing with your body when you feed it a lot of sugar and carbs_ , _like a sugar high, but a ‘comfort high_ ,’ he thinks. If given the opportunity he wouldn’t hesitate to inhale at least three more packets of the crisps in his hands, likely not the best coping mechanism for dealing with the pressure of the moment, but he stuffs a few more portions into his mouth regardless and happily crunches away.

“Wonder what else they have in here. Look at the size of this pantry.”  
Susan walks over to a large door the same size as the one for the walk-in freezer, but this one is made of stained wood instead of stainless steel and it bears a small placard on the front designating it as a ‘food cupboard,’ a label Phil thinks clashes with the actual size of the room behind it, much larger than any cupboard he’s ever seen.

“Thing is massive,” Susan goes on to say. “Must be enough food stockpiled in there to feed a small army for a year.”

“Suze, we don’t have time-” Teague begins to protest her expeditionary mission, but Susan overrides him with a quick, “just want to have a peek before it gets blown away. I’m curious to know how the higher echelon of snobby vampires has been living all this time while I’m surviving on yoghurt and Old El Paso dinner kits.” It’s all she has time to say before she swings the door open and a man with wild clumps of hair and his clothing in disarray abruptly comes tearing out of the darkness, running full tilt into her while yelling in a high pitched disconsolate howl that makes the hairs on the back of Phil’s neck stand up.

His hands loosen in shock and the bag of crisps tumbles to the floor along with a few crumbs which dribble from his slack mouth down the front of his jacket. He takes a shuddering breath meant to be expelled as a cry for Susan to, “ _watch out!_ ” but it catches on the sharp edge of a salty crisp still stuck in his throat, wedging it suddenly into his windpipe and he breaks down into a frantic teary eyed coughing fit instead. He doubles over at the waist and manages to gag up the offending morsel before it can throttle him, but not fast enough to stop coughing and yell out a warning. He doesn’t have to bother however. Teague leaps into action with vicious speed. He darts forward, fangs once more bared to the pink of his gums, feral and terrifying. He reaches out to pull the stranger off of Susan who struggles to escape the hands locked onto her shoulders. The man is stuck fast like a leech and his grip is so strong he tears a hole in the reinforced fabric of her mac when Teague finally manages to yank him away. The man goes violently careening off to the side like a dog coming up short on the end of its leash and Phil thinks it a small miracle he doesn’t suffer whiplash from the way his head snaps backward and then rocks forward again on his neck. That doesn’t stop his raving howls however. If anything, once the man gets a proper look at Teague and the large opaque pupils quickly drowning his eyes in darkness, the man’s own eyes bulge huge in his sockets and the howling becomes a long winded screech like a carousing banshee at a heavy metal concert as he thrashes under Teague’s grip pinning him against the counter.

“Oh god, Teague, they’ll hear us! They’ll hear us!” Susan fearfully glances at the doors as she tries to catch her breath. All the while the man’s screeches bounce off the tiles and reverberate off the pots with a devastating clarity Phil is sure could be heard even in the crowded depths of the basement below.

“Shut up! Do you hear me?! _Shut it!_ ” Teague gives the man a small shake and the aria of wails ratchets up a fraction more in volume. “If you don’t want to spend the rest of your miserable life tacked up on the Court’s walls like a living tapestry, then _shut. Your. Mouth_.”   

Phil doesn’t know if the man believes Teague might deliver on this threat or if perhaps he’s more terrified of watching the dark ichor now completely flooding Teague’s eyes in black pools, but finally the shrill wails retract to a low bubbling moan that begins to sound like proper words. The man is still inconsolable, wracked with heaving shudders that scramble every intelligible sentence into a puddle of blubbering sobs, but in between these fits Phil can hear what sounds like, “oh please tell her- please tell her it wasn’t me. I didn’t mean to-I didn’t I didn’t oh god I didn’t. He made me, I would have stayed, but he made me leave and oh I didn’t mean to I didn’t I didn’t-“ and on and on in tireless repetition until Phil can repeat everything verbatim before the man even speaks. But at the last second, when Phil thinks the man is about to launch back into his spiel about, “I didn’t mean to I didn’t I didn’t,” the lyrics change mid-snivel and he says, “that new blood, that wretched new blood, Daniel, made me leave. I didn’t mean to, but he made me. Please tell her.”

A small thrill of excitement runs down the back of Phil’s arms and next to him Susan and Teague exchange similar looks of knowing wonder. There was only one new blood they knew about in this house named Daniel and it seems too much of a coincidence for the man not to mean the same Daniel they were currently looking for.

“Who are you talking about? Speak plainly. If you want to survive, if you don’t want me to tell _her,_ as I’m sure you don’t, then tell me what you’re talking about.” Teague speaks in a low commanding tone and even though he’s well out of Teague’s line of sight, Phil can almost feel the inexorable pull of the glamour behind those words. The same power which makes the man’s lower lip tremble in compliance to reply. Phil understands what he must be experiencing, something like a headlong fall into a soft veil of darkness, drifting along with the powerful currents of Teague’s whim urging him to speak.

“Go on then, tell me. I won’t hurt you. Let’s start small. Tell me your name, tell me your business here.” Teague speaks again and his eyes are dark stones in his face. The loose diphthong accent and glottal stops of his normal way of talking drops off with surprising abruptness. It’s not anything Phil would deem posh or estuarine. It’s a distinct cadence of neutral formality devoid of his usual swears, slang and colloquialisms. Even his tone of voice drops to a low commanding tide of sound and Phil thinks the reason was probably because the man, likely an employee or guest of the Court, might be more willing to cooperate if he were addressed in a manner he was familiar with. One wrongly placed ‘fuck’ or slip of vernacular and Teague’s small ruse of glamour would fail before he was able to keep the man from launching into another distraught filibuster to inform the entire household of their presence.

It seems to work or at least the man’s attitude becomes noticeably mollified, but he keeps restlessly pulling at the wild tufts of hair sticking out every which way along his scalp out of what appears to be an anxious, stress induced habit. From the way he’d looked on first tumbling out of his hiding place, Phil thinks the man had probably been pulling at his hair ever since they’d walked into the kitchen, fearful perhaps that they’d entered with the purpose of selling him out to whoever he means by ‘her.’ It’s incredible that Teague hadn’t sensed the man before now, but then they had all been focused on the kitchen doors and the more pertinent threat of the group of vampires standing outside. The man in front of them, dressed in the same nondescript black service uniform as Lucy, is clearly human, not a vampire like the others, judging by the state of his normal sized incisors revealed every time his lips peel back nervously from his gums when he speaks.

“I-I’m-my name is Fergus and I work here in the service of the Court. I am devoted to them. I have always been devoted to them.”

“Of course you are, just like all good flunkies without an ounce of common sense for who their employers are and just how badly they’re getting the short end of the stick.” Teague mutters in a low aside to himself that only Phil and Susan can hear. Aloud, for Fergus’ benefit, he says, “Well then, Fergus I’m sure the Court will see fit to reward your –ah…incredible devotion to them, but you seem to be distressed about some new blood  who’s clearly caused you trouble. Tell me about him. Maybe I can help you.”

“Oh, he’s horrible.” Fergus seethes in a low slurred hiss and his hands fall away from their obsessive hair pulling task. “Utterly without class or distinction. Eris brought him here, though I don’t understand why she’d waste her time. I was to take him to the upper floor to be made presentable for his audience with the Court, but that, that _creature_ , tricked me. He made me leave him alone, he told me to find a quiet and comfortable place with no one around to see or disturb me-”

 _And you chose a kitchen pantry? Nice one._ Phil can’t help the little smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth as Fergus continues his story.

“And when I came to I found myself here, cowering in the shadows until I could think of a way to explain myself. Now Eris will be furious with me for abandoning my charge. She’ll think I slacked off on the job- she’ll think I left him willingly when that wasn’t the case. Oh please oh please tell her I didn’t I didn’t mean to I didn’t oh please-”

“Oh please is right.” Susan takes a step back as Fergus once more dissolves into a blubbering moan of garbled pleas. His knees buckle and he’d spill to the floor in a supplicant posture at Teague’s feet like a devotee before an idol if Teague hadn’t reached out at that exact moment to haul him up and pin him back in place against the counter with one hand.

“Do you know where the new blood-“ Teague shakes his head to correct himself, annoyed at the idea of calling Dan by the nature of what he was instead of who he was. “Do you know where Dan is now? If you tell me, we can resolve this matter. Make everything just peachy between Eris and you. I could tell her it was simply a misunderstanding; that it was all Dan’s fault, not yours. Wouldn’t that be good?” Teague’s voice dips into a soothing murmur and Fergus visibly calms.

“Y-yes, very good. That would be…good.”

“So tell me, Fergus. Where is Dan? Where did the Court take him?”

“To their conclave. Where else? But you must know that place is off limits to all but stewards and even they have to be invited, else they wouldn’t be able to access the room. No one but a member of the Court can enter.”

Fergus’ expression has a dubious lilt now, as if he were unsure of revealing exactly where the Court’s conclave was, especially to someone who should have already known. If they pushed him, Phil wonders if he might reach the breaking point of his subservient trance and refuse to say anything more about the Court’s whereabouts, not when he was already so fanatical about serving them to the point of keeping their secrets despite his obvious fear of them, but Phil thinks maybe they didn’t need to run the risk, not when they’d already been given a better clue of where to go.

“Ask him where Cassandra’s Gallery is,” Phil urges. “If we know where that is, we should be able to find Dan and bypass the Court at the same time.”

Teague glances over to him, breaking his line of sight for a bare second to nod in agreement with this idea and Phil notices Fergus hesitate and the dubious expression on his face becomes more pronounced.

“Wait- I, who are you?” He slowly looks at Susan and then at Phil like a sleepwalker just coming to from a deep dream. His brow settles into a morass of troubled lines. A spark of an idea is clearly dawning behind them and Phil thinks it’s probably not a good one. He looks expressly suspicious of them now, no longer so disturbed by the idea of Eris punishing him for his misdeeds. “You don’t belong here. You’re not a steward. The way you’re dressed…look at the state of you. _All_ of you.” He clarifies after another critical glance at them. “No, this is wrong. You’re not -”

 “Forget about that. It’s not important. You only need to listen to me.” Teague’s head smoothly pivots back to stare at Fergus and his voice dips to a velvet lined note of serene conciliation. Instantly, Fergus drops back under his command with a heavy lidded, vaguely dopey expression on his face. “That’s right. Just listen to me. You want Eris to reward you for a job well done, don’t you? You don’t want her to destroy you for slacking off on the job, for not completing the task she set for you to do, correct?”

Fergus’ head lolls in a drunken nod. “Oh please oh please,” he mumbles under his breath.

“Then all you have to do is tell us where Cassandra’s Gallery is. Tell us and we can make this whole problem go away for you. It’s very simple.”

“Very….simple,” Fergus intones dreamily. “Cassandra’s gallery…”

“That’s right.” Teague brings his face closer and those terrible eyes bore into Fergus with a relentless imperative. “Tell me, Fergus. Where is it? Tell me now.”

“It’s…on the third floor. Up the winding staircase to the right of this room, down the golden hall. It’s the room flanked by Apollo.”

At that word, ‘Apollo,’ Phil’s head perks up and he once again recalls the old warning of his nightmare on the train. He’s still not sure what it could mean, not sure if it’s an example of extreme coincidence turned sour or if it’s an omen of something else he’ll find out the true reason for when it’s too late to do anything about it.

 _But as I don’t know and there’s nothing else to be done to find out, then let it alone_. _There’s enough to focus on right here without thinking about dreams containing obscure messages I don’t understand,_ he advises himself. _Although, why does everything from dreams and tarot cards have to be so difficult to understand in the first place? Why not say exactly what everything means instead of throwing out bits like ‘Apollo’ and ‘mysterious creepy looking moons?’ Unless it means I’m fated to undertake a new Apollo mission for NASA to investigate alien life on the moon. That’d be neat. I could be earth’s ambassador and ask them what’s up with all the probing and if they could maybe…stop._

His mind is set to explore this tangent further, but Teague’s voice grilling Fergus for the information they needed jars him back to the more important mission facing him on this plane of reality.

“You’re sure?” Teague insists behind grit teeth. “The gallery we need is on the third floor?”

Fergus nods again, giving way to a full body shudder as if he can’t bear to look down into the bottomless pits of Teague’s eyes anymore. Phil doesn’t blame him. That canting, vertiginous sensation combined with having no control over his thoughts hadn’t been pleasant at all. He’d been able to struggle against it eventually, along with Susan, but clearly this wasn’t the same for other people as Fergus continues to be held captive under Teague’s looming gaze. Teague himself looks emotionally spent from the effort, perhaps from affecting a tone so unnatural to his usual lighthearted modality, but likely more so from the distinct unpleasantness of a task he’d already denounced as a ‘bad mindfuck.’ His face has a sallow appearance, waxen and drawn to make his youthful face look ancient to match his true age. The shadows under his eyes are sunken hollows too skull-like for Phil’s comfort and his shoulders are hunched forward like a sparrow in deep winter huddling under its own wings for warmth. It’s clear, though Teague doesn’t say it, that he wants this to be over nearly as much as Fergus does.

“You’ve been very helpful,” Teagus says and even his voice, though still composed and smooth, has a strained edge to it. “I’m sure you’ll get your just reward for telling us exactly where we need to go, but in the meantime, you know what I think you should do? You should take the rest of the night off and leave this place.”

“Leave…?” Fergus’s voice hits a high pitched note of incredulity, like a child who’d just been told Santa Claus isn’t real. “You think I should…leave the house?”

“Yes, exactly that. Things are going to be heating up down here in a serious way, worse than anything Eris or the rest of the Court could ever do to you and you really don’t want to be caught in the middle of what will happen. Believe me.”

Fergus sways in place, still incredulous at Teague’s suggestion. For someone who professed to be as devoted to the Court as him Phil imagined the thought of leaving the only place of steady income was impossible to fathom. For him, this house was a place where he’d likely been promised more than what money could buy should he prove faithful. Perhaps he’d even been given the guarantee of receiving the tempting stipend of eternity when he was deemed worthy enough, although Phil imagines, given Fergus’s aged appearance, the Court was probably banking on him checking out of existence long before he’d demand to cash in on immortality. He’s the spitting image of the embittered old man Ashton had made Phil see in himself, someone who had lost all hope for himself and his future save for the one the Court promised would be his if only he remained a good and loyal servant to their demands. Teague’s words therefore make a counter intuitive argument he doesn’t seem entirely sold on and Phil watches his internal struggle play out on his face as the grooved frown lines on his forehead ripple in time with his quivering lip.

“But I can’t leave here. I-this is where I must be. I must serve them to get my reward. I’ve worked here for too long to give up now,” he says.

“Fergus, if you don’t leave here the only reward you’ll get is the first hand knowledge of what it feels like to turn into a human piece of coal,” Teague remarks dryly. “We’ll handle your problem with Eris. For now you need to rest, you need to leave. You don’t have to remember you spoke with us or even that you met us. In fact, for your own comfort, put us out of your mind completely. Just focus on leaving this house well behind you.”

Teague’s words finally seem to be making a good indent in Fergus’ prior reservations and he nods again, this time with more assuredness.  
“Yes, I will go,” he intones with a relieved sigh. “You will handle the problem for me. I will leave the house and forget y-”

“Oh hello, what’s going on in here? Thought I heard a human shrieking and wanted to see what all the fun was about.”

A voice interrupts and they all turn as one, eyes wide, frozen in place like posed mannequins to stare at the double doors of the kitchen entrance propped open by a figure leaning in to peer around with a curiously amused look on his face. He’s not dressed at all like Fergus, instead sporting an impeccably tailored silver and gold damask suit with what Phil can only imagine must be diamond encrusted buttons lining the front given how each faceted corner sparkles in the light of the lounge behind him. In the darkness of the unlit kitchen however, the man’s eyes flash with a phosphorescent glow to match the glint of the buttons on his suit and Phil knows instantly without Teague’s preternatural senses to help him that the person staring in at them is a vampire; perhaps a steward just like Ashton or a guest with motives just as cruel and questionable. Either way was bad news.

The curious expression on the stranger’s face slowly gives way to doubt as he takes in the strange tableau before him: two humans in ash covered, muck splattered clothing standing in a broken circle around one equally badly dressed vampire with his hand firmly pinning a Court servant to the kitchen counter.

“Well, this doesn’t look right…” He hesitantly takes a step forward into the kitchen, as if to get a better idea of what he was seeing and after that things happen very quickly.

With Teague’s head turned to look at the newcomer in the doorway, Fergus slips out from his trance and his eyes snap wide with alarm and newfound clarity. Without Teague to set him back under he’s finally at liberty to assess the situation for himself, to peruse his thoughts without interference and realize exactly what’s going on. Once he does, he takes a large shuddering breath and blares his conclusions for the world to hear at the highest volume his voice can go, making Teague stagger away from him in surprise.

“FRAUDS! LIARS! INTRUDERS!” Fergus’ cheeks flush a mottled red. He looks oddly triumphant now, no longer afraid or unsure. “THEY DON’T BELONG HERE! THEY’RE TRYING TO FIND THE NEW BLOOD! THEY’RE INTRUDERS! ENEMIES OF THE COURT! AND ONCE I TELL ERIS SHE WILL REWARD ME FOR FINDING YOU! SHE’LL SEE FIT TO GRANT ME PARDON!” He turns to the stranger and gestures frantically. “GET THEM! DON’T LET THEM ESCAPE! THE COURT WILL REWARD YOU TOO!”

He looks properly mad now, with his mouth resembling a gibbering mask and his hair standing on end like every stereotypical mad scientist in a cartoon sketch. The stranger continues to look doubtful, more from Fergus’ off kilter appearance than his frenzied proclamations, but he takes another two steps forward towards the group. Before he can move any closer however, a large dinner plate, one of the same blue banded pieces stacked in small towers along the counter, suddenly goes flying through the air and hits him dead center in the middle of his face, smashing on impact. The vampire lurches backwards and his hands fly up to cup his nose as he nasally protests, “ow, that hurt! What-?” He’s not given time to finish his sentence before another plate, just as viciously hurled as the first, shatters against his forehead. Another plate finds it mark and then another and another in quick succession. All go skimming through the air like deadly porcelain chakrams towards their hapless target making the vampire duck and stumble to get away.

“What’re you all standing around for? Let’s go!”

Phil turns, startled to see Susan clutching a plate in her left hand from the pile next to her, while she lobs another plate with her free right hand. Her face is a study in grim determination with her jaw clenched and rigid and her eyes narrowed into a hard glare that rivals the one she’d given the Volvo estate which had run them off the road. She has a steady rhythm going, keeping one plate loaded in her left hand at all times ready to be thrown and exchanging it into her right once a plate leaves her hand. As she does this, throwing and reloading from the stacked plates behind her with the unerring precision of a machine, she edges her way cautiously around the kitchen island back towards the double doors and the lounge beyond. Phil understands immediately what she’s doing, creating a diversion to grant them enough time to escape while the flustered vampire continued to puzzle over what the hell was happening and why. Phil also understands once the vampire realized the ammunition being chucked at him amounted to fancy dinnerware and that the small group in the kitchen really was every bit the intruders Fergus denounced them as, he’d finally leap into action to stop them and they’d surely be caught, even with Teague’s presence to fight him off. It wouldn’t matter anyway if Teague managed to subdue this vampire. By the alarm blast yells of Fergus’ voice alerting the entire world of the presence of intruders (“ENEMIES OF THE COURT!” Fergus continues to clarify) it was only a matter of time before the kitchen and consequently the lounge would be swarming with crowds of vampires in numbers Teague wouldn’t be able to fend off all at once, let alone be thwarted by a few plates thrown at their faces. They needed to take advantage of this tenuous window of opportunity to escape and find the stairs leading to the third floor, especially when they had not only a raging fire to contend with but the full extent of whatever task force Fergus might be summoning with his frenetic hollers.

Susan hurls another plate with seamless accuracy and it explodes full in the vampire’s face, causing him to splutter and dart away from her and, in turn, away from the doors as she continues to herd him further into the kitchen. Phil and Teague follow behind, matching her step for step. The kitchen echoes with the sounds of Fergus’ yells and the ringing note of shattering porcelain to create a confused racket the vampire in the fancy dress suit looks too overwhelmed and bewildered by to react appropriately. He cringes against the counter instead, further away from the entrance. Phil continues moving in tandem with Susan’s sidestepping circuit across the kitchen until his back unexpectedly collides into the doors. The loose give of their saloon-door like construction makes the hinges swing out at once with the weight of his backward motion, spilling him out into free space so quickly he doesn’t have to catch himself before he stumbles. He has a dizzy sense of falling and he thinks he’s about to catch the nasty edge of a concussion against the cold marble of the floor rushing up to greet the back of his skull, but Teague reaches out sautomatically to seize his shoulder in time to steady him before he does.  
With one more crescendo of breaking plates as Susan hurls two at the same time with violent force, the kitchen doors swing shut again, back and forth, slower and slower, until they lose all momentum, effectively closing Fergus and the vampire in on the other side. They can still hear the droning blast of, “FRAUDS! INTRUDERS! GET THEM!” but the sound is less overwhelming through the shut doors, yet still loud enough for any passerby in the halls to hear.

Teague stares at Susan in unabashed awe and Phil sees his eyes are thankfully back to normal, though no less haggard and tired looking. “That was fucking incredible,” he says and even his voice is back to normal as well. “How’d you do that?”

“Dunno. Dumb luck I guess. I used to participate in Ultimate leagues when I was younger so maybe that helped.” Susan breathes out the words through the grin on her face as she tries to catch her breath. “ ‘Course plates are nothing like Frisbees, but as we were in a tight spot, I thought I could improvise. Though, I’m a bit rusty.”

“If that’s what you call rusty, what does it look like when you’re in top form?” Phil shakes his head. “You have to teach me how to do that sometime.”

“Sure. When we’re out of this mess I’ll pick up a set of fine china we can demolish and then we’ll make a proper delinquent out of you.” She laughs. “God, that was more cathartic than I’d like to admit. There’s an elemental satisfaction to throwing those things and hearing them break.”

“Yeah, well, you can let off steam at Thomas Goode’s after we’re not busy getting blown up or ambushed by the Court’s stewards.” Teague nods sideways to indicate the ongoing frenzy of a monologue behind the kitchen doors. “Come on. Fergus said the gallery was up the winding staircase to the right of this lounge.”

Without waiting for a reply he sets off in that direction at a fast trot with Susan and Phil in tow. Behind them Fergus continues ranting and as they dart out into the hallway and up the grand winding staircase waiting for them there, his voice begins to ebb away back to silence. Teague bounds up the stairs two at a time and Phil tries to follow his lead without tripping over himself again. The thud of their footfalls pounding against each wooden step matches the dull rumble of thunder outside, just as loud as Fergus’ voice to alert anyone on the second floor above of their presence. But they hit the first landing at a dead run and find it empty. They hear nothing and no one around except for the melodic strains of piano keys from a room somewhere lost in the maze of corridors ahead sounding out a frenzy of arpeggios played at such rousing, breakneck speed Phil wonders how the pianist responsible could possibly keep up. It’s skill of course, perhaps helped along by a vampire’s keen eye for detail and precision, but there’s something about the relentless play of the keys that sounds mad, unnatural even for a vampire, as if the person sat at the bench might be more than a bit mad themselves. Phil doesn’t pause to think about it however and ignoring both the music and the new menagerie of oil paintings staring at them from the walls with identical expressions of sneering distaste, he never breaks stride in following Susan and Teague as they all circle up and around back onto the stairs to take them higher still to the third landing.

Funny how urgency could make things appear different than they were- how time could seem to slow to a maddening crawl and how in such circumstances running could feel like treading water in a dream, an impossible one where trying to get to a doorway at the other end of a hall which lengthened out further away the more one tried to reach it quickly turned into a nightmare. In Phil’s head the staircase seems just like that, never-ending, like a winding helix spinning up into infinity with the landing hidden somewhere at an inaccessible point in the distance. Each breath burns in his chest and every time he inhales he gets an acrid whiff of burning wood and melting plastic. He’s not sure if it’s the smell of the fire gaining ground beneath him or just his own lungs boiling in his ribcage from the exertion of running up too many steps all with deep treads and high risers. He’d expected the years he’d spent dealing with the numerous flights of stairs in their flat might have granted him better endurance over time, but he’s left hoping they reach the third floor soon before his heart implodes. After another long meandering circle of stairs they finally do and although his wildly thrashing heart remains intact he takes a minute to grab the newel post of the banister next to him to slow his wheezing breaths.

“They’re rich enough to install an aquarium in the floor, you’d think they also spring for an elevator,” Susan says dryly.

“Or one of those mall directory signs with a red dot saying ‘you are here’ and showing where we are in relation to the gallery,” Phil replies between each prolonged wheeze. He looks down the hall leading off from the stairs and like the one downstairs, it too diverges off into a crossroads of other meandering corridors, none of which resemble the ‘golden hall’ Fergus had mentioned. In Phil’s mind he imagines something like a King Midas utopia with every inch of wall from floor to ceiling dipped in a glistening burnished polish of gold. He doesn’t see any evidence of that here. Only more of the same oil paintings, Greek statues, antique candelabras and other expensive finery made of crystal, diamonds and precious stones. It’s expectedly affluent and showy, riches fit for any king, never mind Midas himself, but although there’s gold interlaced here and there between the gold leaf filigree on the walls and the gold appendages of the chandeliers and candelabras he passes as they move along, it’s not exactly anything he’d classify as a ‘golden hall.’

“Anybody up here with us?” Susan turns to look at Teague and he goes quiet for a moment, obviously scenting the air for the presence of humans or vampires.

“No. There’s no one at all,” he says with a visible expression of relief. “There was a whole mess of them downstairs on the first floor, along with whoever was playing piano on the second floor, but we’re alone up here. I think this place is reserved for _them._ You know...”

“You mean the Court,” Phil says and Teague nods.

“Not like we’ll have an easier time finding the gallery with how huge the place is in general, but at least we won’t have company on our tail to bother us for a-”

As he says it a loud din of many voices raised in tones of anger and excitement comes to them from the stairs, drowning out the faded echoes of the piano music below. Out of the confused jumble of words Phil can make out the cadence of one voice more clearly than the rest and he knows with unerring certainty exactly who it is. It’s difficult not to, given the bellowing shouts which drown out the other people speaking in unison and from the expressions on Teague’s and Susan’s faces he knows they too recognize the owner of the voice very well.

“INTRUDERS! THEY’RE UPSTAIRS! HEADED TOWARDS CASSANDRA’S GALLERY! QUICKLY! GET THEM!”

“There we are then. Back to the rat race,” Susan says grimly as they set off at full tilt run down the hall with Phil’s heart yammering out its own bold faced protest at the adrenaline fueled abuse it’s being forced to endure.

“Who’re you calling a rat?” Teague breezily calls back over his shoulder to Susan.

“Currently? The thing on your head what used to be hair.”

“Oi, it’s been a long night, okay? Hard to look presentable when I’m currently stewing in what feels like at least six different types of industrial waste.”

“Great mental image,” Phil wryly replies as he remembers the mud encrusted state of his own clothing and tries not to imagine what that mud might actually consist of.

The voices are gaining up the stairs with Fergus’ air horn blasts of recrimination leading the pack. Teague hits the four cornered intersection of the hallways first and stumbles in place as he tries to determine which way to go. With the torch and pitchfork atmosphere of the crowd picking up speed behind them, Phil tosses aside all notions of playing rock, paper, scissors to pick a direction and simply breezes past to the left without stopping. In his periphery he sees Teague shrug in a, ‘ _might as well_ ,’ gesture before he picks up the pace once again. The hall stretches out before them in a ridiculous length and Phil thinks they’ll never reach the end of it before the crowd behind them reaches them first, but they do hit the end and once more Phil picks a path, this time to the right, and sprints off down the adjoining hall there with his breath heaving loudly in his ears. He’s bid on by the same wheeling sense of dumb luck Susan had attributed to her accuracy with the plates, blindly running ahead with nothing else to guide or motivate him save for his body dumping stores of adrenaline to fuel his nerves despite the strained jackhammer beat of his heart and the angry buzzing voices of their pursuers echoing down the halls after them. He gets another strong whiff of campfire mixed with the corrosive stink of charred plastic and he can tell wherever the fire currently wasit was no longer confined to the basement and probably no longer confined to one room either. The crowd chasing them doesn’t seem to pick up on this however, but Phil thinks how could they, when they had the smell of fresh human blood in their noses as a better aroma to focus on?

He can hear someone in the distance behind them shout, “which way did they go?!” and another voice answers, “I think they’re to the right!” just as Phil hits another intersection of hallways and decides to sprint left. A small fear presents a mental image of him accidentally doubling back without meaning to and running headlong into the crowd at the last possible second. He only hopes Teague is paying better attention to know if they were running off course. It occurs to him seconds later that Teague could have easily outpaced both him and Susan any time he wished to find the ‘golden hall’ on his own and that the only thing stopping him was his own decision to hang back in order to defend them both should their pursuers catch up. On the heels of this thought, Phil also realizes the only thing stopping the angered vampires from darting around the corner with inhuman speed and violence to catch them was the considerable distance between hallways and the uncertainty of which corridor was the right one they needed to head into. It was probably difficult for them to concentrate with Fergus bellowing on while trying to listen for where the beating thunder of human hearts and the rising aroma of human blood were strongest. If he were a vampire Phil imagines his head would be ringing with the sound of Fergus’ voice by now. He’s reminded of how Dan could sometimes get in heated gaming sessions when he released his pent up indignation over an impossible level in the form of a protracted almighty screech that made Phil wonder how he didn’t rupture his vocal cords every time he did it or at least contract laryngitis every other week when usually Phil would lose his voice after doing practically nothing at all. Fergus’ voice unfortunately doesn’t show indications of losing volume or steam any time soon, but in a way Phil’s grateful as it’s the best indicator they have of just how far away Fergus and his backup team of irate supporters currently was. At this point, although the voices are close, they’re still far enough behind them to grant Phil the hopeful optimism that they might just run into Cassandra’s Gallery on pure chance well before they were caught. It’s a small idealistic notion a part of his brain influenced by Dan’s dry cynicism doesn’t entirely believe, but he allows it to encourage him forward despite the strained burn of the muscles in his legs and the breaking point of tension collecting in his lungs.

“You know, I said before I participated in Ultimate leagues not track leagues.” Susan gasps and her running pace slows to a stilted jog, left hand out to support herself on the wall.

“We can’t stop now. They’re close,” Teague says.

“I’m _not_ stopping. I’m just saying I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up, especially when we don’t have a clue where we’re going. We’re running blind, just like back in the tunnels, the only difference is we know exactly what’s after us and we know there’s too many of them to fend off at one time.”

“Should have brought some plates with us to thin their numbers a bit,” Phil replies and despite her weary expression Susan laughs.

Teague opens his mouth with a preparatory breath to say something, either to give a smart retort to join their banter or a protest at their slackened speed to urge them on, but the sound of a loud bark in front of them interrupts him mid-sentence.

They stutter to a halt and look ahead to see a small white dog like a miniature Arctic wolf standing at the end of the hallway blocking their way forward, its pert ears up and at attention, its half-moon shape of a tail wagging enthusiastically behind its back. Phil thinks at once it looks incredible. A perfect 10/10 as far as dogs were concerned, but then he supposes that’s what he thought of most dogs in general. It barks again more forcefully and turns in an agitated circle before barking once more.

“You think it’s friendly,” Susan asks warily.

“I guess we’ll soon find out since we only have one option of where to go.” Teague begins to walk forward. “Truth be told, most dogs would’ve usually run themselves mad by now trying to get away from a vampire or trying to get at them. Put one in a house full of vampires? They’d probably disintegrate from the stress. Animals are keen about that sort of stuff. They know when something’s more than a bit pear shaped when it comes to unnatural things and vampires are no exception.”

“So you mean the dog is likely to bite your face off.” Susan follows behind him with Phil close at her shoulder, the both of them watching Teague and the dog with unsure expressions.

“Maybe? But like I said, it’s most dogs, not all dogs and I think this one is alright. How about it then, beautiful? Am I right? We okay?” Teague murmurs as he cautiously treads closer and the dog’s feather duster tail doesn’t stop swaying for a moment. It barks again, but there’s no malice or savagery behind it. To Phil, it seems more like the dog is calling them on forward, urging them perhaps to follow it although that must be impossible.

_Then again, a few days ago vampires were impossible yet here I am stuck in a house full of them following one vampire and an ex car thief to try and find Dan who’s a vampire now too, right after I escaped the glamour of one vampire who nearly tried to turn me into a subservient follower like Fergus. So in light of impossible things actually being possible after all, who knows? Maybe the dog knows something we don’t and is trying to help us._

Teague reaches the dog and when it doesn’t react by launching at his face with a bared snarl of sharp teeth he stoops down and pats it on the head, right between its ears. The dog’s eyes close in a blissfully joyful expression, its pink tongue lolling out at once between the curved grin of its open mouth. Susan and Phil approach more confidently and the dog opens its eyes again and looks directly at them with a gaze that’s undeniably bright and alert and aware. It barks again and backs up further towards the end of the hall. As the drone of Fergus’ voice echoes louder from behind them the dog pads in another tight anxious circle, whining low in its throat. Now Phil is convinced. He’s seen enough movies and heard enough stories to interpret the dog’s actions as anything other than an express command to follow it.

As if the dog senses his resolve it looks at him with its fixed open smile and barks, backing up further as Phil proceeds to walk towards it.

“What are you doing?” Teague looks between him and the dog, frowning.

“We don’t know where to go and this pupper looks like it does, so I think we should follow it.”

“That’s just-”

“Crazy? I mean, sure. Probably.” Phil finishes the end of Teague’s sentence with a shrug. “But we don’t have any other choice and as the dog is the only one in this house who’s actually been friendly enough not to attack us on sight, then why not? What other choice do we have?”

 “You don’t have to tell me twice,” Susan says and follows after Phil and the dog without protest. Outnumbered again and with the sounds of Fergus and his retinue drawing closer to box them in, Teague gives up and falls in line behind Susan, allowing Phil and their new canine companion to lead the way instead. Assured of their cooperation, the dog breaks out into a trotting run down the hall, looking back every so often over its shoulder to make sure the others are still following close behind. When they reach another crossroads of hallways the dog veers off to the right without hesitating. It continues to lead them on in this unerring fashion, slipping right and left or sprinting dead ahead to lead them away from their pursuers and on towards what Phil hoped was the golden hall and in turn the famed Casandra’s Gallery.

Before long Phil sees it in front of them, across another intersection of hallways, dead ahead where the mahogany stained wood of the floor beneath his feet abruptly ends and turns into a glinting resplendent glow of gold paint.

“The golden hall,” Susan murmurs. “He wasn’t kidding. Look at this. Like the world’s biggest Oscar’s statuette threw up everywhere.”

The hall is everything Phil had imagined it would look like and more. No part of the layout in this corner of the house is any other color except a brilliant shade of gold bright enough to hurt his eyes. The enormous tapestries hanging on the walls are woven with gold threaded fabrics, the end tables and small chairs are painted a gold to match the floorboards and the statues here are a glossy sheen of solid gold that still looks molten and hot as if fresh from the kiln. Only the mural on the ceiling breaks the blinding monotony with its depiction of a meticulously painted scene featuring what looks like various deities he doesn’t recognize along with disturbing looking cherubs toiling under a monstrous storm cloud in dark shades of grey and purple spanning the entire stretch of the hall. The dog races on without pausing to look around, darting towards a room flanked by two towering statues modeled after the same figure, namely a young man with a head of tousled curls and a composed, stately profile; nude except for a pair of open toed Roman sandals on his feet and a robe elegantly thrown back across his shoulders and over one upraised arm like a cape. Despite the absence of a bow in his hands, he’s positioned in the attitude of an archer who’d just fired off a shot. A quiver of fletching peeks out from behind his back to reinforce the impression and he looks off into the middle distance as if following the path of the illusory arrow to judge its trajectory. The two statues face each other in mirrored reflections of the other’s posture, framing the two gold doors between them which are open to reveal the cavernous depths of the room beyond. Above the lintel of the doors is a white marble relief of a woman with flowing waves of hair and a morose expression on her face. Between the open palms of her outstretched hands she bears a placard inscribed with words painted in a cursive looping black script which reads: “Apollon Emos.”

“Wonder what that means,” Susan asks after reading the inscription herself.

“No idea.” Phil stares at the words and ventures a guess. “Something about Apollo and…too many emo’s?”

Teague looks at him, points at his fringe and without missing a beat says, “Nah, only one emo here.”

“Very funny…” Phil deadpans.

The dog arrives at a halt in the middle of the open doors and barks again, tail excitedly wagging its way into an invisible blur. This had to be the room then. Cassandra’s Gallery. Just as they approach, eager to escape the painful glare of the hallway, a resounding shout fills the air and the dog’s barks turn into rumbling growls as the soft white fur around its muzzle wrinkles back in a true snarl to show the full set of its needle sharp teeth.

“I TOLD YOU I TOLD YOU! THAT’S WHERE THEY WERE GOING! INTRUDERS AND DEGENERATES ALL OF THEM! DON’T LET THEM GET AWAY!”

Phil whips around to stare in horror at the end of the hallway filling up behind them with a sizeable crowd of dark eyed ominous faced vampires who begin to advance with purposeful strides. Fergus brings up the rear like a military commander, his face so flushed it looks purple, swollen with rage and no small measure of excitement at the idea of corralling the group of wayward trespassers and turning them over to the Court for the purpose of buying his way back into Eris’ good graces.

“GET THEM! BUT BRING THEM IN ALIVE! LET THE COURT DO WITH THEM AS THEY PLEASE! GET THE-”

The vampire closest to Fergus, a sour faced figure dressed in a white three piece suit and a pair of dark  snakeskin oxfords with silver capped points, moves with startling rapidity and cuffs Fergus on the side of his face with the full force of one bunched fist. He goes down hard to the floor with a resonant thud like a dropped sack of cement, stopping his passionate tirade in its tracks.

“We don’t take orders from domestic servants, Fergus. Certainly not from a tired old human like you, so leave off with your idiot braying and slink back to the shadows where you’re better off not seen or heard until you’re commanded to do otherwise,” the vampire says in an even tone and his compatriots sneeringly agree with much laughter and underhanded mutters. “We’ll do with the intruders what we like. We’ll enjoy playing with the humans and drinking them dry. If the Court wants the fool of a vampire there, they can have him after we’re done, but for right now, we’ll have our sport.”

Fergus feebly makes to protest, cupping one side of his fast swelling face as he tries to rise with a garbled plea of, “But Eris –”

“Your business with Eris is your problem. Our business is with blood and these newcomers have enough to satisfy the demand.” The vampire moves away from the huddled, keening figure on the floor and calls out to Teague as he and the group beside him continue walking forward. “You…I know you. London’s little busybody of a vampire. The notorious info broker. You better than anyone should already know it isn’t wise to wander into the Court’s domain uninvited. What is your business here?”

“You said it yourself. Your business is with blood and _my_ business is my own,” Teague replies. “As it is, we’re just passing through.”

 The vampire gives him a pointed, ‘ _let’s not kid each other_ ’ expression. “You’re not welcome in these halls, Teague. You never have been, not when you were just one of the vulgar and common rabble, a lowly villein dependent on whatever scraps your lord would allow you like the dogs at his dinner table, and certainly not now as a trespasser with clothes that smell like the stables and latrine pits you once slogged through.”

“Right. Thanks for the refresher course in medieval hierarchy. So I used to be a serf, what’s it to you?”

“I simply find it funny how nothing much about you has changed in over four hundred years.” The vampire continues his steady progress down the hall, stalking closer with every word he says. “I remember centuries ago when a rumor was spread around naming you as Yilmaz’s new blood. She always had a predilection for the runts of society, her current choice of heir being no exception, but that she should choose _you_ , a renowned nobody, a base lowly servant, who belonged to no guild and held no mark of office to distinguish you in any way as clever or skillful?” The vampire scoffs. “What a joke. I remember even then, the Court had a good laugh about that. We all did. We still do.”

Phil stares at Teague, his mind reeling with this newly revealed information. Yilmaz’s words resurface in his thoughts and they begin to slot together with different scores of context to allow him to make better sense of Teague’s profound dislike for her.  Of course, he thinks, it was only logical Teague would revile someone who had turned him into a vampire merely to abandon him right after, leaving him to make sense of his radically transformed world on his own just as she’d done with Dan. The history of bad blood Yilmaz had mentioned would have grown worse later when Teague had finally pushed aside his deep-seated grudge and gone to her for help in trying to save his friend from the Court’s schemes only for her to abandon him yet again. Teague says nothing to confirm the vampire’s story as true, but given Yilmaz’s deliberate insinuations Phil thinks it must be and it leaves his head spinning with questions he has no time to ask, not with the leering mob gaining on them down the hall.

“Well, you lot keep on laughing then,” Teague says. “In the meantime, we’ll just be on our way.”

 The vampire shakes his head as if this were an even funnier joke than the idea of Teague carrying Yilmaz’s blood. “I don’t know what purpose you and two nameless humans have intruding where you don’t belong, but you know leaving won’t be easy, not now, and especially not after that business with your ‘friend’ last time. The Court killed him and given the chance again, they’ll kill you as well.”

“I don’t plan on giving them that chance, so we’re squared away on that score.”

“Come now. If you surrender to us, if you hand over your companions there, we’ll show you leniency. The Court doesn’t have to know you were here and things will go so much easier for you. And for us. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a bad deal, mate, no offense. If the Court won’t grant me leniency, then neither will the Court’s appointed bootlickers.”

The other vampires bristle at that remark and the atmosphere in the hall, already tense and ominous, becomes direr still. Teague grabs the left and right sleeves of Susan and Phil’s clothing respectively as he talks, slowly pulling them backwards towards the open room behind them. If they could reach it in time before the vampires decided to break rank and charge, Phil thinks they might just be able to escape. He’s aware of the dog backpedaling with them and the entire time it keeps up a steady stream of growls at their feet like an idling motorcycle engine, its quivering muzzle wreathed with sharp teeth.

“Better to be the Court’s ‘bootlickers,’ than their prey.” The white suited vampire addresses Teague again, but his surly expression has turned into one of badly disguised aggravation. “The party downstairs is over and our diversions have come to an end, but you’ve just handed us a new exciting form of entertainment. So no, you’re right, we won’t be lenient with you, not when you’ve so willingly wandered into our midst to be played with like a fly into a spider’s web.” The vampire gives a leering smile and Phil notices his pupils are huge deadened rings of black. “But anything we do to you would be nothing compared to what the Court will do once they know you’re here. Come with us instead. It’ll go better for you, I promise. Surrender. Come with us.”

As Phil looks back into those eyes he feels the familiar swaying pull from before, a strong tugging sensation like a clawed hand hooked into the most tender part of his thoughts and catching there with a terrible yank like a sunk anchor. Just as with Ashton, he feels strangely compelled to do as the vampire asks –to surrender, to go to the crowd staring him down with identical eyes like hollowed empty pits. Next to him Susan totters, stumbling over her feet as if she means to move forward herself, but Teague’s grip doubles down on their sleeves and he yanks back, forcefully pulling them towards the open room instead.

“Come now, stop resisting. Who knows, you all might enjoy the experience. Last chance. Don’t make this hard on yourselves. What do you say to my offer?” The vampire and his friends are now in the middle of the hallway. Their dark reflections waver in the polished gold sheen of the walls to either side like troubled specters and their pace quickens a fraction more as they move closer, clearly hoping the little speech might be enough to convince their quarry to give in without a fight.

“You know what I say?” Teague smiles, an ear to ear grin that resembles the dog’s snarling mouth and it’s this gleefully fiendish, devil may care gesture in the face of certain death more than Teague’s vicelike hold on his sleeve that gives Phil the strength to shake off the insistent tugging sensation trying to pry its way into his head. “I say you can all take your offer and shove it well up your narrow, pompous, manky, cozening arses.”

With this passionate declaration the vampire’s face curdles into a mask of frothing rage and on an unseen signal the entire horde of vampires with him lunges forward with monstrous speed. The sound of their pounding footsteps fills the hall like an oncoming avalanche, but before they can make it more than four paces Teague wrenches Phil and Susan backwards into the room, tossing them behind him so fast Phil imagines for one heady second that he’s entered a reverse hyperdrive state as the golden colors of the hall blur into narrow flitting spears of light in his periphery. He and Susan tumble to the floor of the gallery in a heap and one particularly angled edge of the hippo statue in his pocket socks his stomach on impact leaving Phil briefly gasping like a fish for air. Before he’s had any time to catch his breath, Teague whirls around to shove the doors closed after them with a resounding crash. Less than a second later the sounds of drumming fists and upraised curses begin to thud against the wood in earnest.

“Fuck, they’re strong.” Teague strains to keep the vocal crowd from barging their way through, but the doors tremble under his weight, loosely shivering in the frame with a racket to suggest they’ll open as soon as Teague lets down his guard. Phil imagines with that many vampires applying the full extent of their strength against a defensive barrier which amounted to one vampire alone they might have made it through already, but perhaps Teague’s age combined with the strength of Yilmaz’s blood in his veins made a difference in his ability to keep them out. As if he already suspects the conclusions running through Phil’s mind, Teague shakes his head in denial and grits his teeth against another shuddering volley of blows against the doors. “There’s too many. I can’t keep them out much longer.”

“I’ll help you.” Susan rushes to stand and race forward to add her own weight alongside his, but she stops when Teague looks back over his shoulder and shakes his head with a world weary expression of amusement.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the offer, love, but there’s a formidable team of vampires outside this door. Some of them are stewards, we’re talking about bastards the type what are one step below the Court in terms of strength and sophisticated brutality. One human and a vampire won’t be enough to keep them at bay. You’re better off helping Phil find another way out of this place before it becomes our tomb.”

“Right. No pressure at all,” Susan mutters darkly. The doors tremble again and Teague reasserts his strength to keep them firmly shut. Phil’s only glad they aren’t the free swinging galley doors of the kitchen downstairs, otherwise the ravenous vampires on the other side would have easily pushed their way through in all their many numbers already. The dog, oblivious to the danger or perhaps understanding that for the moment they’d escaped the horde of vampires campaigning for their blood outside, bounds around Phil’s head in a mincing animated dance, barking with a noticeable change to its tone. If asked to define it, Phil would say it sounded happy, more so pleased they’d succeeded in surviving thus far. Each shrill bark echoes in the spacious room louder than the fists and epithets from the hall in a relentless way that would be quickly irritating on any other occasion, but Phil thinks if he were a dog he’d probably be celebrating their tentative victory with a round of frenetic barking too. The silver tags attached to the dog’s collar jingle as it continues pacing back and forth around his head and Phil squints at them from his sprawled position on the floor to get a better look at the writing engraved there. He’s not sure he can stand just yet, not after being thrown at the rate of speed Teague had used to toss him backwards. His legs still feel like jelly every time he tries to move and even Susan, already on her feet, looks unsteady as if they’d both just been ejected from a NASA centrifuge.

While waiting to gather enough strength to stand without immediately falling over like a wilted plant, he braces himself on the back of his arms and does a small push up to try and read the name inscribed on the dog’s tags. It’s difficult to see anything at first with the way the dog continues prancing back and forth, but as if sensing Phil’s curiosity or being curious to see why the human on the floor was staring at it, the dog stills and pads closer to Phil’s head, its barks quieting down to quick little panting bursts of breath through its mouth. The swaying tags finally come into focus allowing Phil to read the single word, ‘Cavall,’ printed in a simple no frills font.

“That’s your name? Cavall?” As soon as he says it, the dog’s head quirks at a left leaning angle and its tail whirrs with renewed vigor in obvious recognition. “Would have figured you for a ‘snowy,’ but I guess that’s too obvious.”

Cavall’s head quirks to the right, tongue lolling out of the perpetual grin of his mouth and he pads closer to Phil, leaning down to nose his hair, inadvertently rearranging the strands of his fringe with the tip of one cold wet nose. Phil tries to duck out of the way with a small laugh, but Cavall follows his face down and continues nuzzling his hair. A paw then gently nudges Phil’s shoulder with the clear impression of a question, as if to ask for him to get up. That small plea, along with the impassioned battering ram force of the crowd behind the doors trying to gain entrance, jolts him out of his pleasant interlude on the floor with Cavall and without having to be told again, Phil quickly uses the urgent incentive of the moment to rise to his feet. The room spins for a moment when he does, turning Cavall into a revolving white blur on the ground. He staggers forward blindly before planting one foot firmly in front of the other and steadying himself.

“You alright?” Susan looks him over, concerned.

“Fine.” The room lurches in another canting dip to the side and he swallows back a rising knot of nausea in his throat. “I mean I will be.”

“Same here. For right now though we need to find a way out of here.”

When the room finally slows back to motionless normality, Phil looks around to take his first good look at the famed Cassandra’s gallery and see if there might not be another way to leave before Teague’s strength gave out. It’s a capacious room, one thankfully not painted in the same monochromatic shade of gold as the hall leading towards it, but it displays the same extravagant show of luxury he’d already witnessed in the floors below, with a high barrel vaulted ceiling brimming with frescoes and elaborately carved stucco and the same antique roadshow menagerie of statues, portraits and furniture. The only difference is, instead of the diamond encrusted chandelier he expects to see over his head like every other lounge he’d passed downstairs, there’s a small cupola fixed into the ceiling allowing him a view of the rolling fury of the storm outside. For a moment it’s all he can stare at as boiling sheets of rain slides down the curved dome of the glass, illuminated by the light of the room and the jagged bolts of electricity in the sky. The tower card Yilmaz had revealed to him comes to mind and as a trembling roar of thunder passes over the house he tries not to think of how eerily similar the storm outside resembles the storm depicted outside the tower in the card.

 _Just a coincidence_ , the Dan influenced part of his mind mutters, but another quieter, more insistent subconscious voice suggests, _and maybe it’s not._  

“Pretty sure there are no doors on the ceiling you two, unless you want to try jumping to see which one of you can smash your way through there first.” Teague calls out to Phil and Susan in a strained voice, wearily staring at the both of them mesmerized by the view in the cupola.

“Er-sorry, got distracted,” Susan mutters as she distractedly shakes her head and next to her Phil does the same, quickly working to put all thoughts of ominous predictions out of his mind and instead returning to the more critical business of trying to find another way to leave. They set to the task with intense concentration, studiously turning over every inch of the elaborately decorated room with Cavall placidly following along by their feet the entire time like a surveyor, but after a minute of frantic searching behind tables and statues and much pressing of hands along the walls to feel for secret levers or handles they might have missed at first glance, they come up empty. No doors. No windows. No way out. Only the inaccessible door they’d just come rushing through and one elaborate skylight too high and impractical to reach.

“I don’t understand,” Phil says after carefully searching the wall behind a statue of what he imagines must be another nude rendition of Apollo himself and in the process getting a better example of callipygian anatomy than he ever thought he wanted to have. “Yilmaz said there would be a door even when it seemed like there was no door. We’re missing something... We have to be. It’s like one of those room escape games, except when the time was up I never had to worry about getting ravaged by a pack of vampires before.”

“Yeah, imagine the Crystal Maze with that kind of challenge added in,” Susan quips. “Will you start the fans please! And will you also start a blood transfusion for Margaret as she’s lost six pints!”

“Somebody better start looking for a door, never mind the fans or Margaret,” Teague grumbles audibly under his breath.

_You will find the way forward in Cassandra’s Gallery. Be warned however, things are not always what they appear. Though you may think there is no door there is._

Phil replays Yilmaz’s words over and over in his head searching them for a clue he might have missed before, but it’s difficult to see what if anything he’d missed in her already too cryptic message. What did she mean by things weren’t always what they appeared? He’d already run his hands over every inch of wall, feeling into dusty nooks and along fraying seams of stucco and crenellated marble plinths searching for anything that might reveal the hidden passageway Yilmaz hinted was in this room. If only Cavall would lead them once more to where they needed to go instead of sitting quietly at the foot of the statue with the too perfectly rounded rear, his head tilted again at a left leaning angle this time to convey a vaguely bewildered air as if asking, ‘what on earth are you doing?’ Phil wonders the same thing too. It feels like he’s aimlessly wandering around, accomplishing nothing and getting nowhere while the gibbering yells of their pursuers outside continues to antagonize him with the threat of his own demise if he didn’t find a way out soon. The smell of fire is a faint but present reek in the air to further intimidate him with a sense of chaotic urgency; to demonstrate how fast things were slipping out of control.

_No time, no time_

The disembodied chorus of his nightmare resurfaces in his memory to unhelpfully join the morass of anxious worry building in his head and he thinks it’s true, whatever small pocket of time they’d been given is fast running out and soon there’d be no time at all, either to save themselves or Dan.

Phil stares off into the middle distance, frustrated with himself and the entire situation, wondering why Yilmaz couldn’t have just told him what to look for or explained where the door was despite her self-professed penchant for being strictly unhelpful. He also wonders why tarot cards had to be so expressly cryptic and why the vampires outside couldn’t just leave them alone and why the statue Cavall was parked in front of was situated at such an awkward angle, pointing to a corner of the room where there was nothing but a large golden lion’s head sticking out from the wall-

_Oh, wait…_

His eyes widen and he refocuses on the lion with renewed interest. There’s something about it which makes his heart take a flying leap in his chest like a sudden bright epiphany he can’t fully explain. Whatever the reason, it makes him cross the room at a fast jog.

“ _To the Crystal dome_ ,” he can hear Richard O’Brien exclaim in his head, but Phil supposes this time the final challenge of the evening might be approached via a slightly altered introduction of, “ _to the golden lion!_ ” Because he’s sure this must be it, this must be the lion Yilmaz had alluded to before and therefore this must be the key to finding the door that wasn’t there but was. It’s only too bad this wasn’t actually the Crystal Maze game show where he could accumulate a stash of crystals to buy more time in case he was wrong. As it is, half of him doesn’t want to face the almost certain disappointment of finding out the lion’s head was nothing but another lavishly decorative addition to the wall, but somehow his instincts tell him that it isn’t just that, just as sometimes dreams weren’t just dreams and sometimes coincidences weren’t just coincidences. Susan calls after him to ask, “what is it- what’s wrong,” but he doesn’t have an answer yet. If the incongruously placed lion turned out to be simply that, then everything would be wrong, but if it was more as he suspected it was, then they were one step closer to escaping. At first however he isn’t sure if his initial surge of intuition had been correct. It just looks like a gold relief of a mounted lion’s head trophy, albeit a stunningly accurate depiction of one, with a fearsome glare to its eyes and minutely rendered strokes of hair making up its immense flowing mane. There’s even a carved notch above the bridge of its broad nose like an old battle wound that had long since healed over to leave a deep scar. Something about its tightly clenched jaw however draws his attention the most and guided on again by pure instinct he quickly fumbles along the shelf of its chin, blindly exploring, not sure if he’ll find anything worth noting and not sure what he’s supposed to be looking for to begin with, but then a raised notch bumps against the pad of his thumb and his pulse races a bit faster. Bending down to inspect it, he finds an embedded screw a small distance below the curved socket of its eye and another just below the first located at the lower base of its skull. On the other side of its head he finds two similar hidden screws along with a thin, barely visible seam which runs the full entirety of its mouth connecting each pair of screws to the other.

“It’s hinged.” A voice speaks up close to his ear and he jumps to see Susan peering out from behind him.

“What?”

She points at the lion’s mouth. “It’s supposed to open I think. But why? For what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should try to open it and find out,” Phil says. “Not like we have anything else to go on and even if we did, we don’t exactly have time to keep investigating.”

On cue, the trembling doors behind them manage to open a fraction wide and a pale hand thrusts itself through the gap, swiping at Teague’s shoulder in a furious bid to grab hold. The drone of angry voices, once muffled, now spills through the minute opening like a blast of surround sound echoing loud in the cavernous gallery and every shout carries promises of their destruction in cruder detail than Phil prefers to hear. Teague utters a short curse between the snarl of his grit teeth, braces his feet against the floor and shoves the doors hard. With the resonating bang of a sprung bear trap, they pin the protruding thin wrist between them and its owner utters an ear piercing screech of pain. The hand immediately retracts backwards allowing the doors to once again slam closed, although for how long, Phil isn’t sure.

Susan appears to have the same uneasy thought in mind because without being prompted she quickly sets to tapping along the borders of the lion’s mouth, looking for what Phil supposes should be the catch to make it open, but after much prodding, poking and scratching, and one moment where she tries to physically wrench the jaws apart by force, causing her face to resemble an overripe plum from the stress of overexertion, she finally leaves off with a shuddering sigh and shakes her head. “It’s supposed to open, I know it is, but whatever does make it open it’s not located on the lion head itself.”

Phil looks over the statue again, desperately searching for a clue to its solution short of chopping away at it with a crowbar.

There’s just the lion head and the bare wall behind it filled with a fresco depicting the same woman he’d seen portrayed over the lintel of the doors outside, with her signature waves of wild hair, long Greek tunic and an expressly mournful expression on her face. Maybe this was the Cassandra the gallery was named after and although he considers it an interesting observation in hindsight, it’s not a considerably helpful one. But he can’t stop staring at her. The way her eyes stare back at him with the same eerie sentience of the portraits he’d passed in the hallway downstairs unnerves him. She looks as if she’s pleading for him to help or to understand, especially given the way her hands stretch out towards him, from the painting, palms up in a supplicating gesture.

 _If you were real and I thought I could help then I’d try to see if there was anything useful I could do, but right now, I’m kind of the one that needs help here, lady_ , he thinks distractedly.

He’s ready to turn away and fumble around the lion’s head again to see if there might have been a detail Susan had overlooked, but another itch of intuition keeps him staring at the painting instead. He looks at the woman’s hands again and for the first time he notices she’s clutching a miniature pictogram of the sun decorated with strange archaic symbols. Each line of symbols proceeds around in a circle, descending in size to the smallest circle in the middle. It’s another interesting detail he doesn’t find particularly useful until, with a trembling note of shock and excitement, he notices the same solar pictogram filled with indecipherable markings etched onto the front of the frame holding the lion’s head in place. Unlike the painting, the design below the lion’s clenched jaws isn’t two dimensional. It protrudes out from the frame in a set of six concentric circles in descending order of size. It vaguely resembles a rheostat dial and he’s instantly curious to touch it. Before he can convince himself against trying, he tentatively reaches out a hand and feels along the border of the first largest circle. To his surprise it moves under his fingers like a wheel, turning ever so slightly with a subtle ticking noise as if it were also moving a network of gears located somewhere behind the frame. Encouraged, he gives it a more forceful nudge and the circle turns freely with more audible clicks like a combination lock. When he repeats the same exploratory method for each ring in turn, they all give off the same mechanical grinding tick as they move. More than a combination lock it reminds him of a Rubik’s cube, especially given the angular rune like symbols lining each ring. Moving just one lined up the runes in new patterns to form what he assumes must be words of phrases, but though he doesn’t recognize the language he instantly gets the gist of what needs to be done.

 _It’s like a coded alarm system where you need the password to disable it_ , he thinks. _Only here, if we input the correct sequence to disarm whatever mechanism is behind the frame, the lion’s jaws should open, and hopefully, it should also open whatever hidden door it’s connected to as well._

Solve the puzzle and they’d escape with their lives, assuming of course his gut feeling was right. If he really was every bit the ‘psychic Phil’ his friends sometimes lauded him as, he hopes his innate talent comes in useful now because he has a feeling they’re going to need every bit of help they can get to figure out the solution to the lion’s riddle before the crowd gunning for them beyond the doors or the smell of fire riding the air breached the room to put a definitive end to their attempts. As a means of visual motivation, he tries to imagine himself in the same pair of polished oxfords as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, as if by virtue of imitation he might be able to tap into the fine-tuned workings of Sherlock’s mind palace to figure out how best to line up the pictogram’s symbols in the fastest, most efficient way possible. He’s so immersed in the part, he only just manages to avoid steepling his hands before his chin as he continues to studiously pore over the glyphs, albeit without the blindingly fast Sherlockian conclusion of insight he’d hoped might come to him.

“You’ve been staring at this thing like it’s a wholesale pack of fizzy cola bottles,” Susan says. “Mind giving us a clue what you’re thinking about?”

“It’s a puzzle. Look here.” Phil quickly emerges from his Baker Street reverie and steps aside to give her a better view. “If we solve it in the correct order, the lion should open.”

“Oh, clever eye, you!” Susan beams and Phil allows himself to bask in a warm glow of pride until she adds, “but er…any idea what the correct order might be?”

“Well…no.”

They both glumly fall back to staring at the designs in uncomfortable silence before Phil remembers Yilmaz’s parting words.

_“Just so you know. You’ll need my name when you get to the gallery.”_

“That’s it!”

His yell makes Susan jolt backwards in surprise and Cavall leaps up on all fours from his seated position to start up another excited volley of barks, his tail wagging with the same fervor of enthusiasm coursing through Phil’s head. At the doors, Teague’s head turns with a bewildered expression to ask, “What is it?! That’s what?”

“Her name! Yilmaz said I’d need her name once inside the gallery. This is what she meant. Her name is the solution!” He’s elated at this discovery and for a moment he completely empathizes with Sherlock’s fervent satisfaction at having made a brilliant deduction, but then Phil remembers the symbols aren’t in English and he has no idea how to rearrange them in an apt translation of Yilmaz’s name and he’s back to feeling less like Sherlock and more like one of the hapless clients in his lounge. Susan notes the crestfallen look on his face and manages to put two and two together without asking him to explain the reason for his dismay. She turns back to the pictogram without comment and makes a low humming noise in her throat, before nodding appreciatively at a sudden conclusion she’s apparently come to.

“Alright, so we know the password is her name,” she says, turning back to Phil. “We just don’t know how to spell it out in these symbols, but I think I know someone who does.”

Phil stares at her. “What-really? Who?”

Susan smiles, roots around in her back jeans pocket and swiftly pulls out her phone. “Google.”

Without another word she leans forward, engages the camera mode and snaps a close up picture of the pictogram. She has to do it again when she discovers the flash had overexposed her first try. Then, with the kind of finger blurring rate of speed to rival Dan’s prowess with a keyboard, Susan opens her browser, navigates to Google and immediately uploads the picture to image search.

“For being centuries old vampires, I’m glad they’re not so behind the times they decided to install Wi-Fi in this place, though it could be faster,” she mutters as the site works to populate information. “Between the storm and how far out in the sticks this place seems to be my network signal is shit so I shouldn’t be complaining when we’d might not be getting any signal at all –oh, wait. Here we go.”

Phil leans over to see the screen. In the search field at the top, next to the tiny thumbnail of the picture Susan had taken is Google’s best guess for what the symbols are.

“Orkhon script?” He reads out the words and cautiously scrolls down to see the accompanying grid of images below. “Oh wow, this is it exactly. The symbols are all there. It’s an ancient alphabet.”

“So pair up the symbols with the corresponding English equivalent and we’re good.” Susan clicks on a website for a more detailed explanation and continues reading what she finds. “Looks like there are rules for translating each symbol depending on vowel and consonant placement, but it doesn’t seem too difficult.”

 _Famous last words_ , Phil thinks, but it’s a small cynical worry eclipsed by the larger sense of accomplishment and hope at the idea they were so close to figuring out the puzzle.

“There’s a bit here that’s confusing- if there’s a vowel after this letter then it should be this one...no, no wait, it’s this one. Or maybe this one? Fuck.” Susan frowns and stares down at the chart on her screen. “I can figure out ten different ways to silence car alarms before they go off alerting everybody I’m out to take their Benz, but being a philologist was never a skillset I picked up along the way.”

“Being a ‘me ologist?’ ” Phil blinks and Susan looks up at him, laughing.

“Philologist. One of those people who decipher old texts and languages for their appropriate usage and meaning. A bit like a linguist. Always thought it was an interesting field in theory, but I’d never have the patience to sit through years of uni to learn it. Still would be useful right about now…” She shakes her head. “All that time spent in maths class learning about the ‘power of triangles’ for nothing and here I am wishing I’d taken a course in 9th century languages.”

She pores over the screen again and Phil bends his head to stare down at the chart with her. They quickly work to pair up the right symbols with the appropriate equivalent to spell Yilmaz’s name with Phil making small remarks and suggestions when he finds what might be a better substitution for the letter they needed. They switch out between different websites, cross referencing one against the other to help their analysis along, but each author’s notes provide different variations of the symbols along with even more variable explanations which only confuse Phil more. If philology was like linguistics he thinks he must have missed something along the way in his studies because it doesn’t feel like linguistics at all. It reads more like a complicated polynomial equation where the rules for its solution were largely arbitrary and fickle. Language itself he knew was largely arbitrary and fickle by nature anyway- London was a working example of this with its incredible sampling of regional dialects, slang words and colloquial phrases all mingling together to create a complex morphology of form, structure and identity that was constantly evolving- But when they needed an accurate, literal translation of Yilmaz’s name and not a loose interpretation thereof, the intricacies of language and its many forms suddenly becomes more of a hindrance than it is impressive, especially in the context of an outdated alphabet with rules of usage he hasn’t a clue how to navigate.

 _Could be worse_ , he thinks. _These markings could have been in kanji and we’d have to sort through 50,000 characters trying to figure out the correct order._

He’s overwhelmed by the task in front of him, but although complicated he doesn’t think it’s completely impossible. The ringed pictogram under the lion’s head offers better clues to help him along, allowing him to isolate certain characters and eliminate others which don’t match the etchings on the rings until finally, after a few minutes that seem agonizingly longer, he settles on a translation they both agree on.

Susan gives a heaving sigh. “Alright, I think we’ve got it then.”

“Do we?”

 “God, Phil, hell if know really.” She messes with the bedraggled strands of her hair nervously, pushing them back away from her forehead. “It seems right, but I have no way of proofreading it to be sure. Not like there’s an app for spellchecking ancient runic script that’s been phased out of present day lexicon for over a millennia. But we have to give it a shot, right?”

“Not to rush you two or anything, but maybe you could hurry and do whatever it is you’re going to do?” Teague calls out to them in an audibly strained voice as he struggles to restrain the vampires currently slamming the full weight of their bodies against the door.

“Right,” Phil says quickly. “So it says here if the writing is placed at a vertical angle it’s read from the bottom to the top, so the first letter of her name should go on the last smallest ring-”

“And the last letter would be on the first largest one,” Susan finishes. “Got it. So we twist the rings around to line up the appropriate symbols in the middle in order to spell her name from bottom to top.”

“Exactly, so the first one we need looks a bit like a ‘9’ which should be...right…here!” Phil spins the ring to find the symbol and he hurries on to move the next ring above it as the slamming noises behind him grow more intense. “The next one looks a bit like an arrow pointing up, but with its left side fallen off and the one after it is like an arrow pointing down but with its right side fallen off.”

Susan nods along to confirm his choices as he twists the rings accordingly and she reads off the next symbols to him, a series of stranger markings which she terms: “a child’s drawing of a fish…thing swimming to the right, a crudely stylized ‘S’ that’s leaning forward and something like a chair or a four with two legs.”

 The rings click into place and as Phil dials the last symbol for Yilmaz’s name he jumps back in full expectation of the lion’s mouth to spring open or for a panel in the wall to swing wide with a theatrical clunking hiss of levers and opening locks, but nothing happens. He stares at the pictogram, nonplussed. He’d done it the right way. He was sure of it or at least as sure as he could be without a scholar of ancient languages around to look over his work. So why hadn’t it worked? He leans closer to see if there was another part of the puzzle he’d missed and an enormous crashing bang from the doors as the crowd pushes forward and Teague shoves them back with another violent shove, startles Phil and he stumbles forward, precariously off balance. One hand shoots up to steady himself and it slams head-on over the raised rings of the pictogram. Without warning they slot backwards into the frame exactly like a large button and the small click of gears he’d heard before comes alive inside the frame with a busy mechanical whirr.

“Whoa…” Susan steps back and next to her Phil does the same as the lion head trembles and the jaws begin to separate. It haltingly slots open by degrees in a jerky robotic fashion as if it had been ages since the hinges had last moved. As it drops open even further the curving spikes of fangs reveal themselves in a symmetrical rows lining the entirety of the lion’s mouth from top to bottom. Each fang displays perfectly honed points Phil is sure are as sharp as they appear to be. The mouth continues opening wide into a silent bellow of a roar to reveal an upraised lever in the shadows all the way at the back of the lion’s throat. This had to be what would open the hidden doorway Phil hoped was attached. He can’t think of what other purpose it could possibly serve, unless it opened up a trapdoor under his feet to plunge him back into the depths of the burning basement like a bad Simpson’s skit, but he can’t imagine someone like Yilmaz devising a mechanism that was the equivalent of a tacky YouTube prank. No, this had to be it, their ticket out of this mess and he’s eager to reach in and pull the lever down to see for himself. With a final clunking series of ticks the jaws finally come to a standstill, swung wide to allow him the opportunity.

To reach the lever meant he’d have to shove his arm in up to the elbow through a forest of wickedly sharp fangs, but despite the danger his right hand shoots out automatically, eager to get the task over with and be on his way back to finding Dan and escaping the angry mob. At the last second however, he hesitates and quickly draws his hand back, every finger trembling in a minute shiver he can’t control.

Susan looks at him, concerned. “What is it?”

“It’s…something Yilmaz said. She told me to mind the lion, it bites.” His hand slowly drops to his side and he stares at the sharp golden teeth bristling inside the statue’s mouth. “I know she didn’t mean a real lion, well, I know that now anyway, but there still has to be a reason she said that.”

“Huh. Probably it’s a built in failsafe to prevent the wrong person from gaining access to whatever it opens.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your standard security protocols,” she says. “On most websites when you try to log in, if you input the wrong password a certain number of times in a row the site bars you from trying again until a few hours have passed as a precaution against hackers. Here, I’m guessing if the system is set up the way I think it is, like a spring activated lock, all you get is one try. If you get it wrong, when you pull the handle, the spring triggers, the hinges snap together and wham-!” Susan demonstrates with a violent clap of her hands and Phil jumps, picturing what she means all too clearly. “The lion’s jaws slam closed and the puzzle resets itself for another go, but as you’re now missing a hand and half an arm you probably won’t have the incentive to try again.”

“Meaning if we got the sequence wrong I’m well on my way to being the fullmetal alchemist.”

“That’s one way of looking at it, but yeah.”

Phil has a sudden profound feeling of nausea.

 _I don’t know if I can do this,_ he thinks, but he knows he has to. The only way to progress forward was by taking the risk and he couldn’t ask Susan to do it for him, no matter how much a tiny part of his brain considers it a good idea. She and Teague were both here because of him after all, because he’d insisted on going after Dan and because they had wanted to be with him to help him and make sure he wasn’t alone to face the innumerable threats the house contained. They could have opted not to come along, Teague could have had Susan drop him off at the culvert exit to then turn around and leave Phil to his own devices, but in the manner of all good friends tethered by an unspoken bond of responsibility and compassion, they’d insisted on going along with him.

_But I’m the one who set this all in motion. I knew it’d be dangerous, but I insisted on going anyway. Now I’m here I can’t let someone else pay the consequences of my decisions for me. If there were a broomstick around I’d gladly stick that in first before using my hand, but I can’t. So it has to be me.  If I back off now, whether or not the combination I entered was correct, we’ll already have lost._

Yilmaz’s interpretation of his tarot reading comes back to mind in his thoughts to remind him: “ _Your thoughts are responsible for the reality you create for yourself. What you most believe to be true will manifest itself as a physical affirmation of everything you think you deserve, for better or for worse.”_

If he decided he was a failure, if he allowed fear and overwhelming worry to pin him in place, then he might as well have not bothered making the effort to come here at all. Besides, he reflects, he’d already proven his worth against both Ashton and Jorin. He’d weathered the mind blowing weight of Dan’s revelations, walked away from a confrontation with the feared vampire Yilmaz, survived a devastating explosion and managed to escape the ravenous crowd of vampires eager for his blood.

 _For the moment at least,_ he thinks warily.

If they’d found themselves in this same situation in an era before Wi-Fi or Google or if Susan had not been with them to lend her phone after Phil’s had become destroyed, things could have gone very differently very quickly and then he might have good reason to hesitate. But things had not gone differently. He had surmounted every obstacle. He was still alive, still determined to see things through with the added advantage of two friends at his side to grant him help and company along the way. Coincidence, luck, chance, synchronicity, fate- Phil doesn’t know what to call it and he doesn’t feel like bothering to define it. The only thing he knows is they’d survived thus far and they had a chance to survive even this seemingly impossible situation too. He finds solace in that thought, in appreciating how far they’d come despite the odds and his only motivating impulse now is of completing this one final trial standing between him and the chance to bring Dan back home.

His mind narrows to the same point of focused calm he always associated with winter tide days, the kind of cold, beautiful profundity of silence and clarity accompanying the first hours following a heavy snowfall when all the world went still and it seemed even tragedy might have taken a rest to simply sit and breathe for a while. He does the same thing now, although when he takes a deep breath he only gets a noseful of unctuous smelling smoke instead of the minty chill of winter snow, yet in his head he’s incredibly aware of himself just as if he were stood in the middle of a snowdrift looking out at a serene white capped horizon. He’s in his element, incredibly sure of himself despite the racing canter of his pulse trundling away under the surface of his skin with every hammer blow of fists against the doors of the room. He doesn’t know exactly what will happen next or how the evening might end, just as he doesn’t know what to call the force by which the universe sometimes compelled individuals to find themselves powerfully drawn towards each other or towards circumstances perfectly aligned to grant them opportunities of abundance and fortune at the least likely of times, but he’s not sure it matters if he never understands the rhyme or reason why. He’s sufficiently motivated by all the things he does know instead, like knowing he was someone capable and resilient and creative; that no one could compel him to change any aspect of who he was or what defined him, just as not even his own internal fears could compel him to change his mind about who he was or what he wanted to accomplish unless he gave in to them.

He knows he and Susan had translated the symbols correctly. It’s another powerful gut instinct he can’t explain and also can’t be bothered to define. It’s only enough that he believed it to be true.

 _It’s fine. I can do this_ , he thinks as he steps up to the lion’s open maw and cautiously sticks out his hand again. _Whatever happens, I’m doing this. No turning back._

His hand eases past the sharp edges of the fangs curving dangerously towards his skin and he reaches for the handle sticking out of the hollowed base of the lion’s throat. His tall height sets the statue at too awkward of a lower angle for him to see into the mouth once his upper arm goes through, leaving him to blindly grope for the lever until he feels its polished surface brush his fingers. Once there, he grasps it firmly in hand and takes a long, deep breath.

 _This is it. Now or never. Here’s hoping_ _if I do need a bionic arm I can get one installed with a popcorn machine in my elbow._

With that thought, he closes his eyes, lets out the deep breath through his nose in a shuddering sigh and with a painful grinding clench of his teeth he wrenches the lever down.

 A loud clunk of metal scraping against wood instantly rings out as the lion’s fanged jaws clamp together with the terrible metallic clang of a dropped guillotine and Susan screams in horror.

Only when Phil’s eyes fly open in searing panic he sees the lion’s jaws are still open and his arm is still intact. The clanging sounds continue however and Phil quickly yanks his hand away just in case the mechanism for the safeguard had misfired and was readying itself to try again. But the mounted statue instead draws back slowly as the panel of wall on which it’s mounted trundles backwards into the darkened recess of the hidden passageway behind it. Another resounding clang brings the panel to a stop and it begins to move sideways now, obscuring the perpetually mournful figure of Casandra as both the statue and the fresco disappears behind the rest of the wall to its left, revealing a tall entryway leading into a thicket of shadows beyond. The mechanical cacophony of gears finally stops and in its absence the only sound Phil can hear is the thundering riot of his own pulse in his ears despite the storm and the ongoing roar of voices outside the room. He remains this way for a moment, deafened by the sound of adrenaline induced nerves while he gazes in silence at the empty spot where the statue had once been. He’d been sure the code was correct, but seeing the evidence of it for himself leaves him winded with awe and a greater sense of overwhelming relief, due in no small part to successfully escaping the iron maiden nightmare of the puzzle they’d just solved.

 “Sorry, I screamed,” Susan says in a small voice at his side. Her words are somewhat muffled by the _thud thud thud_ of his cantering heart. “I didn’t know what might happen and when that noise started up I thought-” She swallows back the obvious at the last second and awkwardly waves a hand in the air towards where the statue had once been, clearly uncomfortable at the thought of mentioning it even though the danger had already passed.

“No worries,” Phil says in a voice just as small and unsteady. “For a moment there, I was thinking the same thing.”

Behind them, Teague cries out in dismay as the doors shudder apart in a gap wider than the first time to allow a multitude of hands instead of just one to flail wildly in the air, all of them reaching with clawed fingers towards his head. The face of the vampire in the white suit appears in the narrow opening, scowling with rage as he tries to push his way forward through the doors, yelling abuse the entire time. Teague’s pupils, already dilated to unnatural size, overtake the entirety of his eyes turning his stare into a livid black eyed horror as he shouts his own withering brand of abuse back. He gnashes his fangs in desperation to close the doors, but it’s clear whatever surge of strength had allowed him to keep the crowd from entering for so long had reached the limit of his abilities.

“Teague, come on! We found the way out!” Susan frantically waves him over and Cavall barks out his own warning for Teague to abandon his post and hurry over to the passageway.

A hand hooks onto Teague’s shoulder and tries to pull him back into the throng of fanged faces leering at him through the door, but Teague resists and wrenches himself away, still trying to hold them back.

“You two go in first,” he calls to Susan through grit teeth. “As soon as I let them in, they’ll all come hurtling in here and you won’t have time to get away. They won’t give you the chance.”

To punctuate this urgency of time and how little of it was left, the mechanical clockwork of gears starts up its familiar symphony again and Phil whirls around to see the panel in the wall slowly trundling back into place to seal off the entrance. Apparently, whatever device powered the statue operated on a timer, allowing the person who correctly guessed its solution a set amount of minutes to go through the doorway before it closed behind them again just like the boom gate in a car park. Once the statue was back where it had started the puzzle would likely reset as Susan had said it would, but they wouldn’t be able to reenter the symbols on the dials, at least not before the vampires caught them in mid-attempt. If they were ever going to leave this room it had to be now.

“ _Go!_ ” Teague roars at them in an inhuman bellow like the booming howl of a monstrous creature and a cold torrent of goose bumps prickles Phil’s skin at the sound. Properly alarmed at the distress in his voice, Phil jolts around in tandem with Susan and they race for the narrowing passageway with Cavall shadowing close by his feet in a dead sprint. They make it into the tenuous sanctuary of the corridor behind the wall and Phil skids to a halt, turning on the spot in an unwittingly graceful pirouette to call out for Teague to join them before the now rapidly thinning entryway closed for good.

The flailing hands and the accompanying arms they’re attached to are now visible up to the elbow through the doors. Fingers snatch at Teague’s hair, tangling in his curls and yanking his head back painfully as more hands emerge to clutch at his throat and dig into his shoulders.

“Oh. You. Cunts. Piss….OFF!” With this rousing speech, Teague surges forward against the restraining bonds of the hands holding him back. At first his clothes catch and hold in the crowd’s iron strong grip, but then his hoodie breaks in a jagged tear along the seams from shoulder to shoulder with a jagged rending sound, leaving one waving hand clutching a wide scrap of fabric that includes the actual hood of the hoodie itself. Teague pays no mind and uses the advantage of his ruined clothing to break away from the mob in a stumbling dash across the room. The doors immediately bang open behind him and the crowd of vampires rushes through like a tidal wave. The white suited vampire leads the charge with a triumphant grin, the silver caps on his oxfords glinting like polished knife points as he gives chase after Teague.

The entrance to the passage is now three feet wide. Teague gathers his balance and plunges towards it, bid along by Phil and Susan’s outstretched hands as they frantically wave him on to hurry. The panel continues its trundling sideways path to halve the opening further. Meanwhile, with nothing to stop their progress anymore and the incentive of fresh blood in the air to further bait their hunger, the vampires are quickly gaining. The gap dwindles to a two foot width and just as Phil thinks Teague might not make it, even given the preternatural swell of speed at his disposal, Teague does make it, albeit by a hairsbreadth of slim chance and outrageous luck. When he’s still a few feet away from the entrance he turns sideways and uses the momentum of his forward motion to slide the rest of the way between the panel and the encroaching wall, tumbling gracelessly into the passage headlong onto the floor. Phil looks up wide eyed at the vampires following close behind him, but he already knows they won’t share Teague’s luck. The white suit vampire realizes it as well and his face turns into an exaggerated downturned scowl of fury like a Greek tragedy mask.

In between the less than one foot sliver of the opening Phil watches as the vampire yells, “ _No!_ ” and makes a last ditch attempt to leap forward and grab them, but at that moment the panel shuts in his face with the heavy thud and clatter of engaging locks. The vampire skids into the wall an instant later and puts all his considerable force in trying to kick the panel down, to force it open just as he’d done with the door, but this time Phil knows with the same clear headed stroke of certainty from before that they’re safe. Nobody was getting through, not unless someone managed to solve the puzzle as well, but given the outraged conversations going on outside in upraised yells of, “ _how does this thing work!?_ ” and “ _there has to be a lever, a button, some way to open it! Look around! Quick!_ ” and another strangely calm remark of, “ _wow, this lion statue is ugly. Who decided this was a good idea,_ ” Phil’s also certain they won’t soon be figuring out the way in.

In the small light of the old style electric lantern mounted on the wall behind the shut panel Phil looks down to see Teague spread-eagled face up on the floor where he continues to remain for a moment, his eyes back to normal, staring up into the dim shadows on the ceiling with an incredulous expression as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually made it through in time. Cavall worries over him, anxiously licking his cheeks, his chin and his nose in an attempt to get him to move. When the licking exploration reaches his mouth Teague jerks away with a laughing exclamation of “ _phwah!_ ” and rolls over to get to his feet.

Susan looks over the tattered state of his hoodie dropping off his shoulders like an open backed jumper and shakes her head with a smile, but she too looks incredulous and more than a bit shaken at their near miss escape.

“You look great,” she finally says to Teague in a wan voice.

“Not too shabby yourself.” Teague grins and leans forward to smudge away a dry speck of mud clinging to her chin. “Though, I never imagined I’d get on board the distressed clothing trend, but here I am. Should start my own Instagram account.”

His mood sobers a bit when he looks back to the closed panel of the wall and listens to the cacophony of kicks and muffled shouts of the vampires still trying to gain entrance outside “Nearly didn’t make it did we?”

“But we did,” Phil says quickly. He finds it important to make the distinction right away. They _had_ made it. Better to focus on that happy reality instead of the bleaker possibilities of a grim outcome which hadn’t come to pass.

“Yeah, thanks to you two sleuths we did. Brilliant job back there.” Teague looks down at Cavall panting excitedly through his open mouth. “You done alright too, pup. We’d still be wandering around chasing our own shadows if you hadn’t shown up when you did.”

Cavall barks in reply, whether in appreciative acknowledgment of the praise or out of simple canine reflex Phil can’t tell, but if he were to bet he’d say it was more likely the former.

“Wonder where this leads then.” Teague nods his head towards the long meandering shadows extending out before them down the long corridor ahead.

“With any luck, it’s wherever the Court has Dan,” Phil murmurs and this time he doesn’t think luck has anything to do with it. He _knows_ this is where the passage will lead them.

He’s ready to set off down into the gathered darkness despite not knowing what they might find waiting within it, when suddenly the droning rumble of kicking feet and thundering fists behind the panel trails off. The raised shouts of the crowd lower to concerned grumbles as one loud, familiar voice bursts into the room, its speech slightly slurred as if struggling to speak through a swollen mouth, but no less clear and vociferous for it.

 “THERE’S FIRE! FIRE ON THE THIRD FLOOR! I SAW THE SMOKE! I SMELL IT! THERE’S FIRE!”

“Oh, shut up, you old fool,” a voice says, but another one, recognizable as that of the vampire in the white suit, angrily objects.

“No, _you’re_ the fool. I smell it too. It’s strong.”

“Too strong,” a reedy voice pipes up. “We must leave! Forget the intruders!”

“Now hold on-” The white suit vampire makes to plead for calm, but the crowd, egged on by Fergus’ consistent drone of: “FIRE! THERE’S FIRE!” all start up their own frightened exclamations. The original goal of pursuing the trespassers is completely overruled and forgotten in light of the more pressing concern of not being burned alive.

“He’s right,” Teague mutters. “Thought it was my imagination before, that maybe I was overstressed from holding those idiots back, but it’s true. You both smell that?”

Phil takes a deep breath and immediately coughs. The unctuous reek of smoke from before is stronger now, carrying with it a palpable corrosive stink of melting paint as the flames devoured the house one piece of painted stucco and cabriole legged furniture at a time.

 _But that’s impossible_ , Phil thinks. _It couldn’t have moved that quickly from the basement yet, at least not to have moved through both the first and second floor in the time it took us to get up here. …Right?_

Next to him, Teague unconsciously answers his thoughts. “I don’t know how it could have moved so fast. Granted, fire always burns in an upward direction and in a basement where there’s no wind to coax it to spread out faster than it spreads up and plenty of debris left over after the explosion to fuel its size, it’ll have broken through the first floor already. Might actually be licking at the floorboards of the second, given all the old crap in here for it to use as kindling. But to already be on the third floor where we are?” Teague waves a hand at the idea. “Nah. If that were true, it would’ve already burned through the liquor stock as well and we wouldn’t be discussing this right now.”

 “Unless someone started another fire up here,” Susan says.

“I suppose. But who? And why?” Teague begins to ask and trails off as the answer of exactly who might do such a thing dawns on him at the same time as it occurs to Phil.

Dan.

Of course, who else? As for why, the answer was obvious. If he were in the same impossible situation Phil had found himself in earlier, if he were trapped with no other recourse to escape or defend himself, then perhaps he’d found a way to fight back with the best deterrent he could find against immortal creatures whose only latent weakness was immolation.

 _Either that or he accidentally started a fire the same way I did downstairs,_ Phil thinks wryly. _But now we’re left with a fire that’s quickly destroying the house from below as well as above with us stuck directly in its path._

Fergus’ wild yells move off into the distance, away from the room and back through the golden hall. The crowd appears to tail after him. Their voices swiftly recede away from the panel like the volume dial on a radio jerked abruptly to the lowest setting and Phil can imagine the vampires racing down the stairs, focusing only on the frantic need to escape. Who cared about the trespassers hiding in the walls when the whole house was set to fall down around their ears?

The thought sends an electric jolt of worry through Phil’s head and he automatically surges forward down the corridor without waiting for Susan and Teague to follow. Everything is happening at once now and there’s no time for forethought, only action. He’s unaware of anything else except the smell of fire rising around him, innervating his powerful impulse to find Dan and turning it into an urge of an instinct that feels as natural and important to him as breathing.

 _Whatever happens, I’m not turning back_ , Phil reaffirms to himself as he proceeds away from the small light of the lantern behind him on into the uncertain envelope of darkness ahead, with Susan, Teague and one clever white dog following silently in his wake.

_I’m not turning back, so wait for me, Dan. I’m almost there. Wait for me…_

 

 ❧

 

  Reading, Berkshire was not a town Dan had ever associated with hip hop moguls or full-fledged gang members, not with its generic panorama of trains, traffic and office buildings placed along more generic streets catering to the average suit and tie commuter instead of grime sound clashes and violent turf wars, but many of the boys he attended secondary with seemed to think otherwise. On days when they weren’t confined to the strict shirt and tie dress code of their uniform dress, most of them wore low slung trousers purposefully styled in the loose belted, sagging-waisted fashion of their favorite rappers. They walked with a rolling loping swagger and greeted others with a quick snap of gun shaped hand signs to convey an air of intimidating cool, because appearances were only half as good at making a point if it wasn’t reinforced with the mannerisms necessary to separate the ‘poseurs’ from the real deal. If they walked the walk then they made sure to talk the talk as well or at least a facsimile of what they believed represented the true spirit of the rebellious urban scene they admired.

The “talk” as it turned out narrowed down to a linguistic medley of Afro-Caribbean loan words and accents, a detail Dan had always thought a bit jarring when contrasted against Anglo-Saxon boys who all came from middle class households where no one else in their family spoke with a Caribbean patois, had never so much as traveled to Jamaica and lived with mild mannered mothers who attended jumble sales and occasionally bought boxed wine and caviar at Sainsbury’s. But despite the incongruities of their borrowed dialects, clashing fashion sense and nicked packets of Rizlas with accompanying pinches of tobacco Dan had been fairly certain contained a bit of cannabis as well, Dan would have regarded them all with companionable indifference. People’s interests were as varied as their personalities after all and if this was their chosen manner of expressing themselves, then so be it. They were all trying on identities, trying to figure out who they were and what they stood for in a world of adults who turned their noses up at the younger generation following after them as if they’d never once been in the same shoes. So who cared then, if in the process of trying to find their own mark of individuality and modes of acceptance, if they smoked a bit of pot laced tobacco after class and listened to hip hop with a passionate dedication to the culture and the clothing that rivaled their deficient attention span to schoolwork mostly considered “long” and “wack?” Who was he to judge, Dan had thought, when he’d once dyed his fringe purple and listened along to bands featuring music and fashion which existed well on the fringe of what was deemed socially acceptable amongst his peers? Live and let live had been his motto from the start. No need to start a fight over reasonable differences in tastes and turns of character. But it was the sneering arrogance and open disdain for people different than them; the violent disposition geared towards seeking conflict at every turn without care or compassion that made Dan’s opinions of them run towards hateful instead of tolerant. Here they were coating their insecurities with shows of bullyboy confidence and smarmy superiority as fake as their accents, antagonizing everyone who dared to be different than them or who dared to step out of line of the boundaries they’d created to distinguish the cool from everyone else. Since first entering the crowded halls of his secondary school with a head full of his own ideas for what cool was, Dan had understood he would always be singled out for some confrontation in which he’d be expected to fall in line or roll up his sleeves and fight to save face.

But he never had.

Even as a child, he’d always opted out from any impending kerfuffle if he could manage it. At five years old, when he’d been surrounded by a group of neighborhood boys who had asked with a troubling kind of eagerness if he’d like to fight them, he’d quickly rejoined with a soft diplomatic apology of: “oh no, I’m not the fighting sort.”

He’d then calmly walked away from the group, leaving them to stare after him with matching expressions of frustrated confusion on their faces.

He imagined childhood granted its own protective shield of sorts, heralding a time when he’d been largely carefree and oblivious to people’s capabilities to be cruel or to social expectations of fashion and behavior. His experiences in primary had been pleasant. In that era of his life he’d been full of energy, excited to try out for lead roles in various plays where he was called awesome and talented, where conflicts had been cursory events he barely remembered and where he’d been surrounded by friends whose company he genuinely enjoyed. In secondary however, in a new all boys school surrounded by new faces and new experiences, it had been more difficult to ignore what amounted to a turbulent hive of testosterone fueled kids all ready and cruising for a row; every one of them striving to earn the top seat in the pecking order of the most respected and feared people in their grade- a reputation they’d decided only fists and barbed words could prove.

 In the early days of Dan’s first year he managed to avoid the worst of the confrontations, easily ducking around the groups waiting for students exiting the nurse’s office, fresh from having a flu shot in their arm, to ambush them with a straight line punch aimed directly at the sore injection site to see how well they could cope with the pain; coasting around conversations in which he’d immediately understood the only outcome from having any opinion that was more informed or merely different would be an eruption of contemptuous outrage prefacing another more aptly aimed punch to the face; conveniently forgetting his sports kit to prevent rugby balls from being hurtled with the force of a ballista at various parts of his body and keeping mum on his music tastes when he knew the only constructive replies would be loud mindless taunts of “emo” or “freak.” He knew the idea behind these small scale confrontations was to make him play along, to incite his anger enough to make him lash out to earn his social stripes, but he didn’t want to play along and he didn’t want to earn their acceptance, not on their terms anyway. He had his own ideas of who he wanted to be, albeit vaguely formed, tenuous ones, but none of them coincided with the expectations of most of the people around him. He knew eventually things would come to a head and he’d be made to answer for transgressing into the realms of the markedly “uncool,” but pitted against losing his identity to assume one he knew wasn’t his, he’d decided to take the risk and be himself, even when he still wasn’t sure exactly what that meant.

At first the days passed without incident. He found refuge in music and online videos made by creative minds with ideas he admired. One in particular, a Northerner with a perfectly straight fringe he envied and varied interests which even more perfectly aligned with his own, caught his eye the most and he’d set to watching this YouTuber with consistent regularity, though it would be a while longer before he’d decide to work up the nerve to message him. For a time, as he immersed himself in these pursuits, like he did with all things he became passionately invested in, he’d occasionally forget the looming danger of the bullies at school, but just as expected, his clever strategy of tactical avoidance could only last so long. The inevitable had occurred one day when he’d been doing nothing more than looking up as he made his way down the hall to another class and briefly locked eyes with a boy slouching against the wall with one hand stuffed down the front of the wrinkled uniform trousers hanging off his hips.

“The fuck you lookin’ at, blud? You want to start with me?”

The boy had nodded curtly in his direction, lower lip thrust forward in a surly pout, baiting Dan to start something, anything, so he could show off his mettle to the friend standing next to him in a similar attitude of standoffish conceit. To Dan the boy had looked a bit pathetic, like an actor badly performing a part that was never meant for him, overdoing his lines and glancing over at his friend continuously as if checking the script for what he needed to do next. Dan had stayed quiet, measuring the volatile energy pouring off the boy in waves, unsure of what to say and opting finally to say nothing at all. He’d merely shaken his head and shrugged to convey, “ _I don’t want to start anything. I’m just looking._ ”

Unsure of how to approach a conversation where his challenge hadn’t been met with a challenge in return nor the expected slinking retreat he was used to, the boy had looked him over curiously.  
“So, you a posh kid or somethin’?”

“Er…no.”                                                                                                      

 _“Er…no.”_ The boy had exaggerated his words into a mocking stereotype of a faux-posh accent and looked back at his friend who’d instantly caught the joke, one hand also stuffed down the front of his trousers as if to hold his balls in place in case they fell off from laughing so hard.

Dan had frowned. “What? I just said no.”

The pair had only laughed harder at what they clearly deemed to be the pinnacle of hilarity. “ _I just said no_.”

“I don’t sound like that,” Dan had said, unamused.

 _I’m Dan Howell and I don’t sound like that.”_ The mimicry had dialed up to a nasally Shakespearean hauteur. “Haha, your mum the queen?”

“Yeah, yeah and he’s prince stupid.” The boy’s friend had sneered.

“Dickhead thinks he’s better ‘n us with his little posh accent. _Want some tea and crumpets chaps?_ ”

“That’s why he was late to school today, ‘cos he was back at the palace busy being a gaylord!”

They’d nearly fallen over as their laughter turned into a raucous free for all echoing down the length of the hall. Scores of apt remarks and withering insults had gathered at the tip of Dan’s tongue ready for him to launch with devastating effect, but he’d found himself suddenly unable to care enough to try. The thought of wasting more time than he already had on people with a crippling lack of self-awareness and discretion had been exhausting and instead he’d stared at them both, giving a strained, bitter smile as he’d thought: _I hope you do something really stupid and die._

The boy had noticed the bristling look on Dan’s face and, interpreting it as a challenge, had straightened up at once, shouting at him in riled up glee to, “come on then, you wanna step? Poncey emo. I’ll fuckin’ rip your head off! Let’s go!”

He and his friend had tensed in the middle of the hall, fairly hopping in place at the excited thought of a fight they dearly wanted to have and expecting Dan to follow through with a bum rush of a punch to set them off, but when Dan had only continued to stare back at them in silence, they’d paused and their faces had taken on a familiar look of frustrated confusion Dan thought likely to become a running theme in his interactions with other people.

“Come on then, step! Step!” The boy had sounded distraught at Dan’s lack of cooperation and started to approach with the apparent intention of bringing the fight to Dan instead, but his friend had reached out abruptly to hold him back.

“Nah, man, allow it. This clown ain’t nothin’.”

 The friend had looked Dan up and down, disgusted, shaking his head with the mien of someone classifying something as a lost cause. They’d both quickly lost interest after that and had turned away, muttering under their breath and snickering over their shoulders at Dan as they’d trailed off into the distance. He’d narrowly escaped their clenched fists, but as word spread throughout the school about the ‘posh kid with the straggling fringe who wouldn’t fight,’ many other fists and insults would soon find themselves thrown his way, each word and weighted blow carrying with it the expectation for him to finally lash out as he was expected to. He’d thought about it occasionally, on days when he had to duck the sharp X-Acto knives chucked at him in art class or had to listen to another barrage of insult laden diatribe, fighting back seemed like just the trick to stopping everything in its tracks. One good head butt, a throat punch, a kick to the groin- anything that carried the definitive weight of violence behind it to warn other people off from ever harassing him again would make his life so much easier to manage. Passive resistance worked well enough for isolated monks who lived in caves far removed from society and all its effects, but when he was immersed in the thick of it, forced to listen and experience every push to conform, to fight or to fail miserably if he refused, being passive seemed more like a lesson in self sabotage than eminent wisdom.

But fighting had never been something which had come natural to him. He enjoyed a good intellectual exchange or the incredible satisfaction of making narrow minded idiots become aware of how stupid they sounded, but physical altercations, wounding someone undeservedly with a careless word or a reckless punch, were not behaviors he had ever gravitated towards. That hadn’t changed throughout the entirety of secondary or university or afterwards in the ubiquitously termed ‘real world’ when he had to deal with the increasing scrutiny of the public and his online colleagues while navigating a mine field of comments and controversies which could have been too easily handled with an aggressively typed post or angry message in a video to aptly convey a sentiment of “fuck off” in concrete terms impossible to ignore.

 _But that’s not me_ , he thinks. _That’s never been a part of who I am. Even when times were difficult and I didn’t know what I was doing with myself or how to deal with people who refused to understand me or how to make myself understood- I’ve never wanted to hurt people. I’ve never wanted to change who I am for people either. I won’t. Not now. Not ever. Just like I won’t be what the Court wants me to be. I won’t change for them and I won’t fight for them. This is my life and I fight for myself, on my own terms in my own way. No matter if I’m forever looked at as the ‘clown’ from here on out. I won’t be their pawn._

As he watches George take up a southpaw like stance in front of the long ironwood table that’s become the spectator seats of choice for the Court eagerly looking on, he thinks his affirmations are a bunch of wishful thinking here in a locked room where no one would walk away from the altercation to follow until either he or George lay dead on the ground. No need to worry about saving face or being a pawn when he was sprawled face down in half a gallon of his own blood.

Before, life had been about fighting to keep his identity, struggling for the right to make his life what he wanted and spend it with the people he wanted. Now however, he’d have to fight for his life in every literal sense of the term. His very survival depended on how well he could physically hold his own against another vampire with a clear, strong motive to kill him as surely George would if Dan were to falter even once.

The room, full of its blindingly white collection of decorative accoutrements, offers up nothing Dan can use as a weapon to defend himself. He’d already smashed the decanter against the wall (after Lethe had smashed a similar weighted vase of lilies) leaving him with only the chair he’d been sitting in, the small end table at his side, two uselessly bound hands and a pair of huge broadswords he didn’t have the faintest clue how to wield. Besides, he reflects, George would be on him within seconds of dashing over to the fireplace to wrestle them down. He can see the intention written plainly on George’s face. He’d said before that he wouldn’t hold back and Dan believes him. After all, the outcome of this fight would determine if George would enjoy an impromptu promotion to being a member of the Court rather than remaining their “hired help.” With that kind of reward at stake, Dan thinks if he were in George’s position, bereft of better options, he might be compelled to go all out as well.

_But I’m not George. I’m myself. and currently? I think I’m also fucked…_

George begins to advance slowly, fists still raised before him, staring Dan up and down to weigh the minute tics and movements of his body to find an opening he could exploit to attack. Dan moves backwards, hands up again in a warding gesture, still trying to make him see reason.

“George, it’s not too late. We don’t have to do this. We don’t-”

Mid-sentence Dan’s legs bump into his chair and he trips backwards, losing his balance and sitting down hard on the seat with an awkward “ _oomph!_ ” Eris laughs, toasting her glass in his direction. Next to her Makhai looks on with a disapproving frown and shakes his head.

“This is why the Assize of Arms should be reinforced,” he says. “There was a time when people were obligated to have training in the art of combat, however minimal their skills actually were. Even the lowliest carter knew how to use a sword or a bow to gain the upper hand in a fight, but this one can’t even use his brains to keep on his feet.”

Dan ignores the jibe and quickly rolls out of the chair to his left, warily eyeing George who tracks the movement and follows him in eerie silence.

“Listen to me alright?” Dan tries again to convince George to stand down, glancing behind him every few seconds to make sure he doesn’t trip over another piece of badly placed furniture. “It doesn’t have to be like this. We’re not their stewards. We don’t belong to them. They don’t get to control what we do.”

“Neither do you.” George’s stare never wavers as he speaks. “I already made myself clear. I’m going to fight until I can’t anymore. I suggest you do the same or this is going to be over before it’s started.”

He keeps moving forward determinedly in a visible reinforcement of his thoughts towards Dan’s suggestion. Nothing about his movements are harried or frenetic like the schoolboy bullies in secondary had been. There’s a brutal exacting grace to his posture exactly like a seasoned fighter who understood every discipline and strategy of the trade and knew exactly how to employ them to the best of his advantage. As if to demonstrate this, George makes a quick darting movement like a hawk plummeting towards the ground after prey and in one oddly balletic motion that’s as graceful as it is vicious, he strikes out at Dan’s face with a perfectly aimed fist. If he were still human Dan’s certain that fist would have buried itself in his mouth and broken every tooth lining the front of his jaw from top to bottom, perhaps traveling further to make quick work of his molars as well leaving him to choke on splinters of enamel, but he sees the blow coming and with preternatural alacrity he instinctively dodges to the side, well before he’s even aware of doing so. The fist whiffs past his cheek instead, still too close for his liking, but far enough off course for his heart to do what feels like a cartwheel in his chest out of ecstatic relief. George doesn’t allow him to enjoy the reprieve for long. His head whips to the side to follow Dan’s movement and without breaking stride he pivots and strikes out again. Dan once again marks its passage before it can connect and feints to the side under the curving swing of the fist’s trajectory. George follows after with dogged concentration and Dan stumble-staggers away from the next furious set of blows, distantly amazed that none have found their mark yet.

 _Better not to think about it_ , _because as soon as I do-_

He thinks about it and as soon as he does, without warning, a crushing blow of rock strong knuckles connects with his chin and rocks his head back. His vision instantly fills with stars and a freshet of pain courses its way up his head like a lightning bolt.

Between the tinny ringing of his ears he hears someone call him a clown, another voice calls him the posh kid and it takes him a dazed minute to realize the voices are merely in his head, distant memories of his less memorable moments in secondary conjured up to the fore by a punch to the face that feels oddly familiar to the punches he’d experienced at the hands of less adroit people than George.

He marks a complicated blur approaching in his periphery and he blindly ducks away, still unable to make out anything except a swimming panorama of white and a tall greyish silhouette wavering towards him. It’s George, he’s aware of that much at least and he stumbles away from the next blow he’s sure is about to follow. The room spins in a nauseating circle, making an illusory obstacle course of the floor and without meaning to, unaware of any direction to head in save for any direction that wasn’t in George’s path, his stumbling gait leads him to crash directly into the Court’s ironwood table.

Lethe throws up her hands exuberantly, cheering him on with a raucous cry of, “ _OLÈ! OLÈ!_ ”

“This isn’t a bullfight, dear,” Eris says. “Now, if he were fighting Makhai then perhaps it would be.”

“If he were fighting me, he’d already be dead.”

 Makhai crosses his arms in arrogant confidence, or the cloudy specter Dan thinks is Makhai appears to cross his arms. It’s difficult to tell what’s what with his head still spinning from George’s blow, but the pain is fast receding to a dull hum thanks in no small part to the inhuman blood in his veins. Dan’s once again amazed at the rapidity with which he heals, like a built in auto-regen set to restore any wounds quickly over time, but he doesn’t have time to stop and think about it in detail. George is advancing more rapidly than before and his jabs travel through the air faster as well.

 _You know why that is_ , a small subconscious voice speaks up in Dan’s mind. T _he first few tries were the teaser to the main event. He was sizing you up, to see what you were capable of, to see how fast you could move, looking for gaps in your defense. Now that he knows you’re not so skilled or formidable he’s going to close in and finish it off._

His vision clears in time for him to track another deadly fist aimed for his face and Dan sprints backwards out of reach. The small side table reappears as the spinning blur of the room reasserts itself back to motionless normality and out of sheer reflex to defend himself he snatches it up the best he can manage through the taut ropes pinning his wrists together and chucks the table straight at George’s head.

He swears he doesn’t put nearly as much force behind the throw as he’d intended to. In his mind, it’s a gentle horseshoe toss at best, like a hapless character in a TomSka sketch who on being given a gun to fire on an attacker, opted to lob it in a bad pistol whip attempt rather than pull the trigger. If he were handed an actual pair of guns right now to defend himself he has a feeling he’d do the exact same thing, assuming of course if he were able to even lift up a gun with Kevlar rope tethering his hands into an awkward mono-pincer. Yet, despite the limited range of motion available to him, when the table leaves his fumbling grip it hurtles through the air in a blurred projectile so fast it loses all shape as anything recognizable as a table and slams into the side of George’s face. The impact throws him back to the floor, his eyes wide in shock. Lethe applauds with another rousing cry of, “OLÈ!” and even Aeacus, previously silent and grim, seems to begrudgingly nod in approval of this unconventional, but creative use of furniture.

George shakily rises to his feet and pauses to look down at the perfectly halved ruin of the table which had quite literally floored him. Dan stares down at it too in disbelief before then looking at his hands, as if by staring long enough at the small lines and veins in his palms he might be able to understand just how he’d managed to use so much strength behind one feeble throw. It’s exactly as it had been in the alley with the drunken man from the pub who had confronted him until Dan had pushed him and unwittingly sent him careening full tilt into the metal bins against the wall. He’s not sure if he’ll ever understand how to wield his newfound strength with true efficacy, but as George rounds on him again he thinks he better learn and fast. He’s not given time to react before George is in his face, eyes pooling to a dark shade of black Dan knows can only mean trouble and suddenly hands are hooked into the collar of his shirt. He’s lifted up from the ground in a startling rush of speed and for a moment as his vision fills with a perfectly framed view of the mural on the ceiling he thinks of his father lifting him up off the kitchen floor in a desperate attempt to clear a boiled sweet out of his throat.

 _We’re just reliving all the best memories tonight, aren’t we?_ Dan thinks with strangely composed clarity before George tosses him with the same speed as Dan had thrown the table and he’s suddenly airborne, flying backwards on a terrifying pull of g-force like a rollercoaster ride on the fritz, until he smashes into a compact boulder of a marble statue across the room. Stars again. Bright and swirling in front of his eyes like a rave party after too many drinks and too many fluorescent lights aimed at him with the blinding force of a searchlight. He slides down the front of the statue and collapses to his knees, too winded and dazed to stand. The side of his temple throbs, referring the pain to his ears and down the sides of his neck like a bad flu and he thinks if everything happening to him right now were portrayed in a cartoon his head would be ringing with the sound effect of a deep tone bell. George is on him again in an instant. He stoops down, meaning to snatch Dan back up into the air again, but before he does, Dan flings up his bound hands defensively and blurts out, “wait, let’s talk about this.” As soon as the words are out of his mouth, Dan wonders exactly what the hell they were meant to talk about in the middle of a situation like this. He imagines the conversation would play out like an impromptu ISG session in which he read out an email along the lines of: 

 **George/immortal/London**  
 Hey, Dan.  
You threw a table at my face and I’m pissed.  
So I’m going to kill you now.  
Cheers.

How else could he respond to that except to idly shrug and say, “Yeah, sounds reasonable.” It must sound reasonable to George as well because he grabs Dan up again without waiting to discuss the particulars and in another stomach lurching burst of speed Dan finds himself tossed bodily through the air to this time connect with the solid face of the wall behind the statue. It gives a strange hollow, reverberating thunk when he broadsides it, as if there were nothing on the other side like a sealed off walk in closet which had never been filled in afterwards with insulation or sheeting, but even if his thoughts weren’t spinning in his head along with his brain to allow him to consider this small detail, he has no concern for anything else other than George’s silhouette looming over him again like a bad thought that won’t go away. Hands once again dart out to reach for him, but instead of gripping his collar, George goes for the restraining series of knots around his wrists. He grips one, turning it into a makeshift handle he uses to yank Dan forward and behind him as if he were revving up for a discus throw. Eris had billed the rope as unbreakable, but when George slingshots him forward through the air, the incredible force of tension exerted on the ropes between the pull back and release neatly snaps the crisscrossing network of coils in two. Dan would celebrate his new freedom if he were conscious of it, but he’s barely aware of himself as he’s left to hurtle into empty space again, through a haze of pain and carousel wheeling vision, with only one small thought of, ‘ _well this is inconvenient_ ,’ running through his head before he connects with a thundering crash against the great metal and wood doors of the room.

The frame shivers with the impact, enough to dislodge a few darts loosely embedded in the wood, but it’s nothing compared to the bone rattling shudder of his body as he collapses to the floor. He can taste blood in his mouth from where his fangs had involuntarily clamped down on the lining of his cheek and the taste is somewhat sweet on his tongue, although watery and unpleasant for the pure fact of being his own. Another copious rill of blood snakes its way down and over his left eye from a gash in his forehead, momentarily filtering the sight in that eye with an uneasy shade of red. He shuts it and is left with an overexposed field of vision in his right eye that’s somehow worse. It’s difficult to move, more difficult by far to stand, but he knows he must. George advances across the room towards him, throwing the now useless rope away from his hands and taking his time in walking as if he knew Dan wouldn’t soon be able to get up to fight back, not after weathering a jarring body blow he’d need more than a few seconds to recover from. The idea makes Dan struggle harder to stand, but all he can manage is a futile wiggle sideways on his stomach.

“End it here. Put him out of the shame of his existence,” Makhai calls out to George and gives him a thumbs down gesture like a Roman emperor signaling the execution of a downed gladiator.

Dan blearily looks up across the room towards the blazing fireplace and the two gleaming swords crossed over the mantle. They’re the best defense he has in a situation quickly spiraling out of his control where no amount of tables could help him, but despite their proximity they’re too far away for him to reach in his disoriented condition. The blood over his left eye seeps between the closed lid with a stinging jab of pain to disorient him further. When he moves again, a similar sharper stab in his chest makes him gasp and he doesn’t need an x-ray to tell him it’s probably due to a broken rib. Two ribs seems more likely. He can feel the distinctive tingling, knitting sensation of his blood working to heal both wounds, but it’s not quick enough to restore him in time to get away from George who finally crosses the distance between them and pauses in front of his head, studying him at length in silence. Dan glances over again at the swords teasing him with the possibility of defense and George follows his line of sight to look at them too. He carefully kneels down then, inclining his head to look Dan over with a neutral blank expression on his face. His eyes are the only clue to his emotions, pitch dark with the thrumming energy of the fight and the imminent promise of victory.

“You won’t reach them in time, you know that,” George murmurs, indicating the swords hanging over the fireplace. “And you know you won’t be able to use them even if you do.”

“I’d try,” Dan says through a weak sigh of breath. His voice is barely audible to himself, but George hears him and nods.

“I know you would. Just like you’re trying right now even though this is a fight you might not even win. Even when you have nothing left, even when you don’t want to fight at all, you still try.” He reaches down to curl a hand into the back of Dan’s shirt and bodily hauls him up from his prone heap on the ground to a seated position against the doors to make him level for George to speak with more comfortably. The movement aggravates the stabbing pain in Dan’s chest and something inside him pulls taut, perhaps a torn muscle further impaled by the sharp edge of his broken ribs, inducing a choked cry of agony to catch in his throat. He seizes George’s hand in a painful grip, mouth open in a soundless gasp to plead with him to stop and on his tongue he can still taste the watery sweetness of his own blood. George lets go without argument, immediately dropping his hand away to rest over his knee in the same posture as Rodin’s The Thinker.

“You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you,” George says in a low conversational tone and through a haze of pain Dan automatically thinks in response, ‘ _you’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?_ The abrupt incongruity of this hits him with a hysterical, inappropriate urge to laugh, but the sharp tug in his chest and George’s black somber stare kills the sound before it can escape.

“You’ve been made to answer for the crime of protecting your friend and of defending yourself; for daring to be your own person and in effect daring to defy the Court.” George continues to speak, oblivious to Dan’s brush with Zelda induced hysteria. “But they’re not really crimes at all, are they? They’re what a person does when they value autonomy and freedom. You taught me that. Everything you do, everything you are, is a working demonstration of all the things you value most.”

Dan can’t fathom the reason for this speech. It’s difficult enough to follow along with his own rambling thoughts let alone George’s words. This was it. This was the end. He’s already consigned to whatever might happen next, wearily numb and detached at the idea of his own demise. He’d had a good run, all things considered. A self-made career built on his own creative vision, a few million people invested enough in that creative vision to watch his videos from places spanning the entire globe, a successful radio show which had once broken the internet on its inaugural air-date, increased opportunities for travel to places he had always wanted to see, a roommate whom he’d first admired distantly as a viewer and then quickly moved on to occupy the role of best friend; sharing space in each other’s lives where they lived together, worked together and loved together in all the way they deemed suitable and appropriate for them. Unlike Makhai’s nightmare vision, Dan had watched himself grow out of the bullies in Berkshire and shirk off the weight of their derision, going on to leave his mark on the world in an indelible way that would always be unique to him; carrying his signature of personality and passion so that anyone who saw it and knew his name would automatically come to recognize what he’d made as being undeniably that of Daniel Howell.

 _What a life it’s been_ , he thinks. _I did so much. Took every risk to put myself out there; to create something of my own and in the process, achieved something important and good. How many people can say that? How many people dream of doing the same thing and end without ever trying to do it at all? I created a small legacy of my own. I loved and was loved in return. All in all, not half bad._

Yes, he could leave this existence satisfied in the knowledge that he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do from the moment he stacked an old laptop on top of a leaning stack of books and hit record on its low res camera to film an introduction which had spawned a phenomenon. One in which Phil had lent his own voice and vision to build an isolated universe they both held equal ground and happiness in despite the usual spat of difficulties and arguments life unpredictably tossed their way, as it did with all people at all times, regardless of age or standing. They’d tried their best, weathered every difficulty and kept their pledge to remain best friends through it all. What more could he ask for? He has no death bed regrets. If this was it, then let whatever happens, simply happen. He’s ready.

Phil features heavily in his thoughts however and it occurs to him that it would be nice to be able to call him up before exiting stage left forever, just to hear Phil’s voice for a bit, ask him to talk about anything, be it houseplants, Haribo, or trips to the eye doctor. At this point, he’d be content with a rundown of Phil’s top five clothing hauls. With anyone else he’d be halfway to yawn-ville and zoning out the entire time, but Phil had an effortless way of turning the most menial of items and situations into an intriguing topic of conversation, helped along by Phil’s inimitable skill for injecting his stories with startling turns of whimsy and humor. Dan thinks he could use a dose of whimsy and humor right now. If he were able to, he thinks he’d like to drift away into the darkness of oblivion with Phil yammering on in his ear about eating too many chocolate covered espresso beans, catching rogue centipedes and accidentally buying houseplants taller than he was. Death row prisoners were always granted the concession of their favorite meals before meeting their fates, maybe the Court could grant him the final request of being able to speak to Phil before George make good on Makhai’s pronouncement. It’s a nice thought, but he knows it isn’t likely to happen. He’d have to content himself with the intonated blast of thunder echoing over the house and the violent snap of wood in the fireplace and the sound of George telling him to play along with what happened next if he wanted to escape with his life.

_Hang on…._

His left eye, sticky with dried blood, pops open along with his right in surprise. He refocuses on what George had just said and it’s like trying to listen to a radio channel gone fuzzy with static. George sees the effort to understand dawn on Dan’s face and he repeats himself in a low mumble of an aside the Court can’t overhear.

“We can’t both fight the Court, but one of us can create a diversion so the other can get away and I want that person to be you. So I need you to play along with what I do next. I didn’t mean to hurt you like that before, but I needed them to think I was on their side, that I was ready to do as they asked. That way they won’t suspect what’s coming.”

Dan opens his mouth to ask what George means, but George shakes his head and gives him a small deliberate shake that rattles the still healing edge of his broken rib and Dan cries out instead.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” George hastily mutters. “I need them to believe I’m drawing out the entertainment for them, otherwise they might get suspicious of what’s going on. No, don’t try to say anything. I’m only glad I was able to break the ropes Eris tied around your wrists. I wasn’t sure if I could. Now you’re free to use your hands for what comes next. But first, before they wonder what’s taking so long and come over to see for themselves, say, ‘No, please!’ as if you’re still trying to convince me not to fight. Quickly!”

Dan hesitates only for a moment and then, in a quavering voice still straining to speak past the sharp stabs of whatever had broken inside him he shouts, “No, please! We can still try- it’s not too late!”

“For you it is.” Makhai snickers from behind them. One the heels of his remark, Lethe’s supportive cheer of ‘olè!’ turns to a boorish taunt of a Bronx cheer instead and both Aeacus and Eris look distinctly put out by the turn of events.

“Good,” George says with visible relief. “The only thing you need to do is play along. I’m going to stand you up and hold you against the doors and you need to struggle as if we’re still fighting. Then, when I say so, _as soon as I say so_ and not a moment after, you’re going to leg it through here, back the way we came. You’re going to activate the entrance and run out of this place like every bad thought and worse demon was chasing after you.”

‘I don’t- I- why are you-” Dan tries to speak anyway despite George’s admonition not to, intending to ask him why he’d suddenly decide to do this, especially at the expense of risking the full magnitude of the Court’s wrath, but with his head still recovering from the needling ache pounding behind his eyes, proper syntax eludes him.

“You’re finished,” George suddenly intones in a loud clear voice for the Court to hear. “You failed and this is the end. I’ll take what’s owed to me.”

Behind him Makhai mutters, “Just as I thought. The new blood proved to be no great challenge.” Eris meanwhile raises her nearly empty glass in a salute to George’s back. “A sorry outcome,” she says. “I had such high hopes for our smart mouthed Daniel, but we welcome you regardless, George. Take your reward and when you are finished you will be one of us.”

 “ _Quickly now, struggle! Fight! Play along until I say otherwise_.” George hisses to him covertly. His eyes continue to loom dark and unyielding, but the tone of his voice is desperate for Dan to do as he says.

 _I have to pull this off well enough to convince them it’s real or we’re both done,_ he thinks. _It’s like an on the spot improv deal where if I break character once they’ll instantly know something’s wrong, but I think I can manage it. For one last shot out of here, to get to Phil and leave this place behind- yeah, I think I can play along just fine._

He doesn’t know what will happen to George once he leaves, but he’s sure it won’t be anything pleasant. He only hopes in the chaos of the moments to follow that George will be able to escape too. It’s the only consolation he can find and he takes it. There’s no time to agonize over it further. He’d been granted a chance at escape and he needed to act on it. Now. And so without further hesitation or attempt at comment he sets to doing exactly as George had said.

 The tugging pain in his chest has subsided to a tolerable ache allowing him to move and he reaches out to grasp George’s forearms to steady himself, conning it off as if he were grappling with George instead. He nods, a quick jerk of his head to signal he was ready and immediately George lifts him up to his feet and slams him against the doors with a resonant bang. Dan struggles in his grip, exaggerating each sideways toss of his body into a frenetic jerking dance. The ache pulls harder with a more painful degree to make him cry out again, but halfway out his throat he turns it into an enraged battle cry that sounds a tad too shrill and unsteady. The Court seems to buy it anyway and over George’s shoulder Dan notices Lethe wincing away from the volume of his voice while Makhai looks on with an interested quirk of his eyebrow.

“So, the new blood finds a second wind,” he says. “Maybe the whelp can redeem himself.”

Encouraged by the success of his acting, Dan hams it up even more. He tenses and belts out an almighty yell, channeling the spirit of his own high spirited screech from every gaming channel video that had ever made Phil consider buying soundproofing tiles for their walls to prevent the neighbors from rioting. George’s eyes go comically wide at the sound, (behind him, Lethe distantly pleads for a, “bit less noise!”) but he doesn’t flinch back from the performance already in motion. Dan thrashes to the right and George follows through to give the impression of being dragged along. Another thrash to the left and George smoothly goes with it as well. They continue like this, returning every powerful shove with a violent push back, making a frenzy of their clawing hands and kicking feet, only this time without the threat of critical damage to break any more bones in Dan’s body. When George lashes out again, his fist connects in a calculated blow devoid of the previously devastating force he’d only a few moments before packed behind his bunched knuckles. Dan lets his head thud against the doors anyway to sell the scene as genuine, like a fight sequence in a movie where one actor feigned a devastating uppercut and the other feigned a staggering recoil from the impact when nothing had actually happened. It’s all in the sounds and the gestures; in how well he can convey what the eye expected to see. The Court had snubbed him for being nothing more than a performer, but it’s that exact skill which now holds them mesmerized in their seats, unable to discern the falsity of what’s happening right in front of them. If they wanted a show then he’d give them one. And on the way out, he’d make sure to give them the finger as well.

 _But maybe after I’m well enough away from the house first. Not to push my luck_ , he thinks.

This isn’t a stage show production and there’s more on the line here than a standing ovation of approval for his performance, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t enjoying himself. He gets a wicked sense of satisfaction from the seamless choreography he and George have going. Every move is perfectly synced towards an apt parry or reaction, suffused with an eerie unconscious grace he’s barely aware of. He’d like to think he has some innate sense of rhythm given his ability to play piano by ear, to tell when he was off; when the tempo and tone weren’t right, but this is different. The careful, methodical progress he usually employed for transcribing a piece of music to a keyboard is gone. In its place is a blinding surge of astute intuition. He instantly knows what he needs to do. There’s no painstaking plod of trial and error, no doubt or hesitation. He’s in his element, ducking, swaying, jabbing and kicking- all of it in time with every move George makes. He doesn’t know if it’s his otherworldly nature enhancing the abilities already natural to him, if for his example his brain is picking up tiny flickers of gestures and tics of muscle, the way he could already instinctively pick out the appropriate key he needed for a composition, but augmenting it with the acuity of an experienced predator to prime his reflexes with the appropriate response of when to feint and when to lean into the curving swipe of George’s fist before he’s even struck, but whatever the reason Dan is fiercely delighted. If there were a mirror nearby he already knows his reflection’s eyes would be pitch black. It’s not the pique of hunger or anger dilating them now, but an overwhelming sense of ‘rightness,’ like the gratifying fulfillment he felt when he’d completed a project or video within the nth degree of detail of exactly how he’d envisioned it in his head first, but magnified tenfold. There’s probably a word for this he reflects, some obscure term in the same spirit of ‘zemblanity’ to describe what it feels like to be so perfectly caught up in the flow of everything slotting into place exactly as planned. If prodded to explain himself he’d tentatively describe the feeling as euphoria, but it feels like something else much more profound and intense. In another moment of time, when he was awake at the latest hours of the night, alone in the soft darkness of his bedroom idly browsing Wikipedia and the vast network of information housed within Google’s search bar, he’d probably investigate the idea further to see if he couldn’t put a name to it for his own personal reference later, but right now his mind is focused only on the heat of his performance. He immerses himself in it with single-minded abandon until the vast room narrows in significance to encompass only the thin margin of space he and George occupy.

Behind the ironwood banquet table, their meager audience is clearly enjoying the show, still oblivious to how it’s nothing more than just that. Lethe once again raises her cry of, “ _Olé!_ ” unusually concentrated on the battle instead of drifting off into another idle daydream as per her usual habit. Makhai and Aeacus by contrast offer no rousing sports chants for the two opponents, but they look powerfully intrigued despite their silence, leaning forward in their seats like baseball fans during the last inning of a pivotal match waiting for the homerun which will decide the winning play of the night. Eris mimics their posture and smiles behind her wineglass of blood, following every move with undisguised relish.

Dan spares no concern for them. In fact, he’s barely aware of them at all. The rending stitch in his side is gone as is the wound over his eye, leaving behind only traces of a localized ache better classified as an itch. In the wake of his recovery, he feels energized, exalted. _Deep, dark and dank,_ he thinks incongruously and once again fights back an impulse of hysterical laughter.

The sensation of euphoria which was something more than euphoria floods his brain with endorphins. As their synchronized battle draws on without a hitch and he continues to execute every necessary motion and reaction flawlessly, like a perfect Full Combo run of an already difficult song in Guitar Hero played on expert mode with his hand flying down the frets without ever once second guessing himself or missing a beat, the chemical cocktail in his body multiplies, inducing a near rapturous state. If _this_ was what Makhai meant by tapping into the raw potential of his newfound nature where he no longer had to overthink every action or be limited by his own inhibitions, then he thinks he could definitely get used to this. However, his mind, ever analytical and shrewd even when in a state of concentrated frenzy, warns him of the too present danger of losing himself to the sensation completely, the way any good thing in excess could unexpectedly spiral out of control, pulling him under with the same devastating force as Makhai’s glamour. If Phil were here to witness his frenetic energy he’d almost certainly caution Dan to calm down a bit, take a breather and a step back, but without anyone to hold him in check Dan carries on, heedless to even his own subconscious advice.

George mimes a haymaker and Dan blocks it with a swift upward sweep of his arm. George’s other fist leads in to try its luck and Dan blocks that as well. The leftover momentum then allows him to spin George around in a violent burst of speed and pin him against the doors. Surprise blooms on George’s face as he’s yanked sideways through the air and when he smacks his head soundly against the wood, hard enough to send a ripple of impact up the frame, there’s no artifice behind the pained grimace which twists his mouth. Yet, he doesn’t break character for a moment as he responds by mirroring Dan’s move, twisting out from under the pinioned grip of Dan’s hands digging into his shoulders like claws and spinning him right back around into place, albeit with more care. Dan doesn’t notice. His fangs curve down to indent his bottom lip and his blood traces a livid path under his skin, yearning for blood in kind- for the symbolic bloodlust of battle and for the literal blood running hot through George’s veins. It’s a fragrant incentive drowning the air around his face and suddenly it’s all he can focus on. He’s forgotten the other increasingly acrid odor of smoke and fire seeping into the room just as he’s forgotten their heated brawl is merely a performance, a benign skit meant to facilitate their escape. He wants blood. He _needs_ it. And to have it he must win. It’s the only thought running through his mind when he pistons his knee up and out, carrying with it every ounce of untapped strength and driving it full force into George’s stomach.

He realizes an instant later what he’s done and where he is when George lets out a choked, “ _hurrrgh_ ” sound of genuine agony and doubles over at the waist.

Panic and true remorse freezes Dan in place. He’s terrified, both at himself and at the thought that perhaps he’s just mortally injured George. Visions of ruptured spleens and burst livers come to mind and he has no idea if vampires were capable of healing internal organs or if they were even necessary in the first place, given how his lungs are no longer such a critical issue where his newly transformed biology was concerned, but he’s instantly remorseful anyway and more than a bit upset. He’d never meant to hurt anyone, but in a fit of pique he’d forgotten himself and once again, on the technicality of nothing more than chance he’d remembered himself in time to keep from finishing George off by plunging his fangs into his neck. How many times would he be allowed the fool’s luck of not succumbing to his baser instincts before his endurance cracked or luck finally stopped deciding to intervene and instead allowed him to tumble headfirst into becoming the spitting image of his twisted mirror double from Makhai’s vision?

 _No. Not now, not ever_ , he thinks, but his blood continues to simmer in hot yearning pulses under his skin and in his head another quieter, slyer voice of his subconscious asks, _“Are you certain?_ ”

It speaks with the strangely familiar cadence like a hyena’s laugh, low and mocking, and despite his convictions, Dan finds himself unable to answer.

George staggers and another groan rattles deep at the base of his throat. Startling from his troubled thoughts, Dan moves forward, ready to apologize profusely, but George whips his head up and flashes him a furious wide eyed stare warning him not to say a word. His face is still scrunched up in agony, but behind the pain he looks determined. He sways forward with deliberate steps meant for Dan to take the hint and catch him before he pretends to fall. Dan swiftly reaches out at once and grabs his shoulders, ducking his head low so the Court can’t see the concerned look on his face he can’t quite disguise. George inclines his head up, close to Dan’s ear and under his breath he seethes in a hissing whisper, “ _This is it!_ _Go now! When I push you, open the doors behind you and run. No hesitations, no questions-just run!”_

With that, George charges and shoves him with every bit of violent force Dan had previously used to knee him in the stomach. ( _not that I don’t deserve it_ , Dan thinks at the same time in wincing embarrassment) Then he goes sprawling backwards. Before he crashes into the doors, he whips his hands behind his back, seizes the handles and twists the knobs. The doors open at once and he plunges out into the empty air of the hallway. He reverses the fall midway towards landing on the floor and with mindless grace he pivots on a heel toe spin and turns around to ‘leg it’ as George had advised, but in the split second between turning away from the room to the hall he’s dully amazed at what he sees George do next. After pushing Dan, he turns in the same fluidly graceful motion without breaking stride and races towards the Court like a guided cruise missile homing in on its objective. No one has registered what’s happened yet. Eris’ glass is still raised towards her lips for another drink and Makhai has the same ‘sports aficionado’ look of rapt attention stamped on his face. Before anyone can figure out how quickly things have changed, George reaches the heavy banquet table, grips it in both hands and upends it in a great heave, sending it spinning through the air like a violent coin toss directly at the Court seated behind it. While the table is still caught in a dizzying series of revolutions, well before gravity sends it crashing back to the floor, George is off again like a shot, sprinting towards the fireplace and the two broadswords hanging over the mantel. Dan doesn’t risk any more time to see the rest. He wrenches himself away and jets down the hall at a dead run, calling on the flood of endorphins stored in his nerves to fuel his haste. The portraits and tapestries on the wall blur together into meaningless blobs of color and his hair pushes back from his forehead in the small slipstream of air created in the wake of his passage. He only hears a cry of outraged alarm when he’s halfway towards the darkened entrance looming ahead, but he’s certain without turning around that it’s meant to indicate George, not him. With one vampire armed to the teeth with a lethal broadsword, he imagines the Court will have enough to occupy them before anyone managed to figure out he’d turned fugitive at the same time as George had turned traitor.

The towering statue of Eris’ namesake comes into view again with its familiar malicious stare and outstretched golden apple of discord. The giant copper brazier in its other appleless hand remains bright with twisting flames to illuminate the end of the hall and the metal box housing the switch he needs to open the mirror entrance beyond and escape.  From behind him comes another cry, this one of dismay and he doesn’t know who it belongs to until he hears Lethe’s distinctive dreamy lilt of a voice raised in a furious shriek of, “ _his head! His head!_ ” Dan has no idea what that’s supposed to mean and wastes no time trying to figure it out. Freedom is one switch throw away from his grasp and he means to seize it while he can.

He sees the box clearly in front of him and as he runs to bridge the distance his hand stretches out towards it in the same attitude as the statue above him offering its dubious gift of fruit to the world. He’s hell-bent on reaching the switch now and his hair flattens back from his brow as he calls on everything he has to narrow the last stretch of feet to victory. He can already see himself opening the box and slamming the switch home to activate the entrance. His rushing daydream flickers ahead in his thoughts to show himself sprinting through the house, knocking over anyone and everyone who might get in his way as he barged into the basement to find Phil. Assuming of course that whatever had caused the explosion he’d heard earlier hadn’t relieved him of the trouble of ever finding Phil again. It’s a remote possibility that sounds ridiculous as soon as he thinks of it. Phil is safe. He doesn’t know how he knows, he simply does and he also knows it has nothing to with preternatural insight or psychic intuition. It’s simply another indefinable feeling without a name, one rooted in love, itself largely indefinable and nameless in all its great variations, uniting people in strange unpredictable ways that made the idea of knowing exactly when a loved one was hurt or in danger seem almost normal by comparison. Phil is alive, Dan is sure of it and he means to find him and get them both away from here before the fury of the storm or the fury of the Court could consume them both.

 His left hand reaches out and brushes the smooth metal edge of the box, but before he can flip the lid up and open, a searing burst of pain suddenly engulfs the back of his hand and travels up his fingers like a 600 volt surge of electricity.

_(OH GOD THAT HURTS THAT HURTS THAT HURTS–!!)_

His thoughts are bright with incoherent panic and when he looks down in disbelief he sees two metal darts embedded deeply in his skin, well past the long needle points of the tips, halfway to the wider circumference of the barrel. They jut out like freakish metal spines, grinding against the thin bones of his hand with every twitch of muscle to spark another flare of electric agony. He’d heard of ‘carpentry darts’ and ‘masonry darts,’ but he wonders what someone might call a shot like this. ‘Fuck ton of agony darts’ seems appropriate.

There’s only one person he’s currently aware of who could sink a double bullseye with two darts at the same time with such precision and although instantly horrified, he’s not surprised when he hears Makhai’s voice directly behind him.

“Of course you’d resort to the coward’s only defense to turn and run. Just like the rat you are.”

He speaks in a tone brimming with cold, malevolence to match the smell of malice tingeing the air with a sour fragrance Dan has come to define as ‘sickly dread.’ Back in the room, the smell had been strong, but now it’s magnified to an overwhelming stench carrying with it the promise of his own demise approaching directly behind him. Dan cups his trembling hand to his chest as he turns around and promptly finds himself staring back at an echo of his mirror double from the glamour induced stupor he’d succumbed to before. However, here, in waking reality, the resemblance is only fleeting. There’s no mistaking the furious vampire looming in front of him as anyone other than Makhai. He looks every bit the rabid bull Eris had accused him of being. His teeth are bared wide from to ear to ear in a humorless grin and his eyes are dark, unblinking voids in his face. Dan wonders if this is what he’d looked like while in his frenzied state and his stomach roils at the idea of himself looking so violently unhinged, like a revenant motivated only by the singular impulse to kill. George had shown him mercy, but looking at the implacable cruelty etched on the face staring back at him, Dan is sure that Makhai will not.

“Both of you, cowards to the core, but at least George managed an impressive siege while he lasted. Although, after Eris stepped in, he didn’t last very long,” Makhai says flatly. “Neither will you, not if I have anything to say about it.”

Dan isn’t prepared for how Makhai then launches himself forward in a savage burst of speed. A cold manacled hand seizes his wrist in a bone crunching grip, sending a new burst of pain up the fingers of his right hand to match the agony of his left, then for the fourth time that night Dan is hurtled through the air at breakneck velocity. The statue of Eris races up to meet him and just before he slams into the solid marble face of its plinth he thinks after tonight he really ought to change his username when he gets the chance to a more apt title- perhaps one along the lines of, ‘danisnotafrisbee.’

His left hand becomes crushed under his body when he falls limply to the floor and the darts slide further into his skin until he can feel the needle point tips dimpling his palm from the inside, threatening to skewer his hand completely. He can’t help the shuddering scream that rushes from his mouth. No need to channel his enthusiastic yells from gaming videos to sell the sound as genuine. This pain is a high definition version of his earlier injuries. It burns through his hand up his arm to join another stabbing jolt in his chest, more than likely due to another broken rib, perhaps the same one which had healed over only to shatter again. Yet, writhing agony is only part of the reason behind his ragged scream. He’s furious. He’d been so close, so close damn it! His fingers had hovered within inches of tripping the switch, he’d nearly recovered his freedom, nearly managed to escape this purgatorial dimension of murderous critics and oppressive rhetoric, only to have his chance of escape brutally ripped away. He doesn’t think he could take Makhai in a one on one battle, especially not an old school Roman general who, according to Eris’ earlier insinuations of him being a traitor, might not be adverse to the idea of playing dirty to get his way.

 _Not that he’d even waste his time_ , Dan thinks. _He wants me dead. Fullstop. He’d have probably killed me already before I even had a chance to turn around, but he wants me to know he’s going to kill me, not sneak up behind me and surprise me with it. That’d be too merciful for him. Or dishonorable. Whatever. He’s going to kill me and I can’t do anything to stop him._

The idea makes him more furious. Now that he’d been given a second chance thanks in no small part to George and had in turn come so close to victory, he’s no longer blasé about the idea of his own death. He means to leave. Now. Whether he had two darts sticking out of his hand or two dozen by the end of this. There had to be something he could do, some way to incapacitate Makhai in enough time to get to the box, throw the switch and run.

A sizzling hiss at his side startles him and he looks down to see a red hot lump of coal baking in a simmering aura of rising heat on the floor. Another one abruptly rains down through the air like a bizarre hail stone, sputtering with steam as it bounces across the floorboards, leaving a trailing flume of bright sparks behind it. A creaking groan above his head makes him look up to see the statue’s copper brazier swaying precariously back and forth, apparently offset by his jarring collision. The statue itself seems off center as well, as if it had been knocked askew from its original placement nearly to the brink of falling over when the force of his body had shoved the pedestal beneath it back along the floor. He’d originally thought both the statue and its accompanying plinth were attached, but now he sees they’re not, a breathless idea of a last ditch gambit dawns on him as Makhai stalks forward, closing in to make good on his threat.

“In my time we punished defectors of the imperial army by stoning them to death.” Makhai breathes the words through the clenched rictus of his grin. “In truth, perhaps that should have been my fate as well, but my position saved me from that disgrace and you have neither rank nor cunning to save you here now. I don’t have any stones, but I think beating your face into this statue until there’s nothing left but a bloody pulp will more than suffice.”

The hot lump of coal hisses like an angry snake at Dan’s side and without thinking about it, Dan leans over and snatches it up into his right hand, quick enough that all he feels is a transient blanket of warmth before he lobs the thing directly at Makhai’s face. Just like the table he’d thrown at George, the burning coal zings through the air like a bullet and finds its mark squarely in the middle of Makhai’s forehead. For a moment it seems to stick to his skin, adhered there by the force of Dan’s throw, and immediately there’s a nauseating wet splutter of burning flesh as the coal’s livid heat boils the skin above his eyebrows. Makhai gives voice to his own bellowing scream and he claws at the coal, batting it away across the hall, but not before stumbling backwards and onto the floor in his panic. Clearly, in all his years as the seasoned general of a Roman army, the one foe Makhai had never been prepared to confront were combustible rocks.

When his scrabbling hands fall away from his face there’s a charred spot in the middle of his forehead like a dark third eye to match the fathomless black pits of his other eyes. The edges of skin around the spot look sickeningly yellowed and peeled over like crumpled tissue paper and Dan can smell the tang of it in the air, sharper than the ominous dread still drifting around Makhai like a smelly aura. Before Makhai can recover from the shock of this surprise attack, Dan rolls to the side and darts around to the back of the statue with his left hand still singing a throbbing aria of pain against his chest. Without hesitating, he rams the statue with his shoulder. The brazier sways in a wider pendulous arc on its suspended chain and more lumps of burning coal go flying across the floor. One sets the dangling edge of an old tapestry on fire, consuming the aged cloth at once in a column of flames like a vertical avant-garde torch, but Dan ignores it. The statue is closer to the edge, but not quite far enough for gravity to help topple it the rest of the way over. It’s stuck in limbo, half in and half out, precariously stood on the brink like a Damocles sword ready to fall, but not quite there yet. He rams it again, harder than before to give it the extra bit of incentive it needed. More coal skitters and leaps around him in a dangerous downpour of sparking flames. One errant piece hits Makhai on top of his head and he paws at it angrily, spitting curses and outrage as he scrambles to get up.

 _No you don’t_ , Dan thinks viciously. With one final shoulder numbing shove, the entire thing shunts out to the edge of the pedestal and goes over. It tumbles through the air like a felled tree, the brazier spilling fire and steaming coals in its wake and just before it crushes him in a cataclysm of marble, Makhai looks up into the face of the statue barreling down with the speed of an HS1 train and mutters, “oh, you bitch.”

The sound of impact is catastrophic, like an explosive clap of thunder going off right next to Dan’s ear. Jagged pieces of marble go flying, taking out paintings and candelabras on the wall. One narrowly misses Dan’s head and he ducks below the edge of the pedestal to avoid another. The metal weight of the golden apple in the statue’s hand comes loose and bounces heavily along the floor before coming to a stop somewhere in the shadows lost from view, no longer a symbol of anything but defeat. When it’s over, there’s nothing left except a mountain of rubble which had once been carved in a human shape, a crackling mess of burning coals and the head of the statue itself looking up towards the ceiling with a broken face, its expression changed by the huge fissures splitting its features from top to bottom so that it no longer looks sly or malicious, but wearily amused by the irony of its own destruction. Of Makhai however there’s no sign and it seems as if the renowned praetor and ‘rabid bull’; the once famed general turned traitor turned member of the Night Court, is dead.

 _And if he’s not, he won’t exactly be springing back up on his feet anytime soon. Not after being swatted into the ground_ , Dan thinks.

A buzzing surge of pain calls his attention back to the two metal darts jutting out from the back of his hand. He’s not exactly keen on the idea of having to yank them loose, but the scalding pain burrowing into his knuckles doesn’t give him a choice. He tries to think of them as overgrown splinters, (“ _a spelk_ ,” the Phil part of his mind helpfully supplies with a hint of Northern inflection) but it’s difficult to pass off the rods of metal in his skin as just tiny slivers of wood. They hurt and when he grabs one tentatively between thumb and forefinger it hurts more. A hairbreadth’s touch is all that’s needed to send pain shuddering through his hand. In a dentist’s chair, with a hygienist working over him with the sharpened pressure of a metal scaler, he’d learned how to turn what might have otherwise been a lesson in modern day torture into something like a game of endurance by mentally filtering every short jab of pain into a numbing tingle until it became almost strangely pleasant. But there’s no mitigating the sensation here into anything other than horrifically excruciating.

_Just get it over with. First one, then the other. Let’s go._

He grits his teeth, sets his grip around one dart and pulls. It wrenches free from his skin with less pain than he’d expected, leaving behind a small perfectly rounded hole that wells up with blood and quickly heals over as he looks on. He moves on to yank the last dart free and it pulls free smoothly as well. They’re both smeared halfway up the barrel with the red of his blood however and he’s uncomfortable at the sight of it. Without pausing to stare at them any longer, he promptly tosses away the last unpleasant reminders of Makhai’s presence to join the rest of the rubble on the floor.

Relief is a palpable flavor he can almost taste in his mouth, sweeter than blood and fiercely satisfying, but when he races over to find a way around the pile of debris to reach the entryway’s control panel, the flavor sours in a hurry. Apparently, wall fixtures and portraits hadn’t been the only things the statue had destroyed on its way down. The metal housing for the switch is completely demolished. Of the switch itself there’s nothing left but a sparking tangle of wires. Even if it had remained intact there’s now a writhing barrier of flames standing between Dan and the closed off entrance. The fire grows from the coals and spreads to every available piece of tapestry, portrait frame and wooden floorboard, like a starved, wild creature that had been caged for years and on finding itself free, had decided to go on a rampage. The antique tapestries carry the flames along the walls like a wick, igniting the flames up to the ceiling. More flames fan out to engulf the portraits, hesitating at first as if sampling the wooden frames to see if mahogany was to its liking. A polished corner chars to black and then in a rapturous exhale of smoke it ignites. After that the flames leap gleefully through the rest of the painting, melting the paint into dense runnels that droop and sag the portraits into horrific caricatures like ghouls. A vintage black and white photo of a person who looks eerily just like him down to the soft curve of his cheek and the tousled curls of his hair, dressed in an equally vintage style outfit with a rounded lace collar, is the next object to fall victim to the encroaching fire. The glass over the photo shatters with the heat and his strange Victorian doppelgänger melts away into a black indistinguishable blob as the fire finds the wood grain and albumen paper to its liking as well. More tapestries ignite and the stucco on the walls bubbles into a froth of melting white paint right before Dan’s eyes. A popping shatter of glass rings out as another picture frame is destroyed, followed by three more in a row like pistol fire at a shooting gallery. Within seconds the entire end of the hall is choked with blinding flames and blue smoke.

The heat singes across Dan’s skin like a whiplash and he backpedals away. His vampiric instinct, ingrained with a deep seated aversion towards fire and sunlight, instantly pings with a primal alarm, and it colludes with his already ingrained human instinct of self-preservation to make him utterly terrified of the flames now roaring into a full-fledged blaze in front of him. It leaps around the boulders of marble on the floor and Dan thinks if Makhai wasn’t already dead under there, the flames would make quick work of finishing the job. The only problem, Dan reflects, is he’s now in the direct path for the fire to consume next.

He’s stunned by how quickly it’s spread from lively hissing coals to a multiple alarm disaster. With the blaze blocking off the only known exit, he’s faced with no other option except to go back the way he came, but he shakes his head at the idea immediately. Going back isn’t an option at all. There was no way out of that room except for heavily reinforced barred windows and even if he thought he could pry the iron bars apart like Wolverine, he’s faced with the more troubling  dilemma of once again confronting a group of enraged vampires who would likely destroy him on sight. Never mind his reputation as Yilmaz’s new blood or recruiting him to replace the loss of Makhai. He’d defied them, killed one of them, in their own house no less, and if he didn’t find a way out, he’d pay for those transgressions with his life.

_Great, so what now?_

As he tries to brainstorm another alternative to leave, a cold and brutally strong hand grabs the back of his collar, yanking him with such force he’s nearly throttled by his own shirt. Then, in an instant replay of the way his entire night has gone so far, he’s seized in a riptide of incredible force and flung down the length of the hall, back in the direction of the very room he hadn’t wanted to revisit. He falls just short of the room itself, instead hitting one of the open doors at an angle and ending up sprawled in a heap along the threshold. Dazed, he looks up to see Eris walking towards him, taking her time even as a tapestry comes crashing down off its metal brackets in a ruin of flames right next to her. She’s holding one of the white broadswords from the mantel piece in her left hand, swinging it at her side with ease as if it weighed nothing at all.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she says. The burning backdrop of the hallway surrounds her in a corona of towering flames, but she sounds remarkably calm as she speaks and Dan is glad at least one of them is. “You’ve made a mess of things, Daniel. So self-righteous with your speeches about compassion and love and yet you’re nothing but a liar; nothing but a cheat and a murderer.”

The sword flashes wildly as the hot orange light of the flames glints off the steel. Dan can’t help staring at it and wondering exactly what Eris meant to do with the sword, although the dispassionate cold look on her face gives him a fair idea.

“Yes, you’ve made such a mess of things,” she says again. “You defied us, colluded with another against us, killed two of our own– things didn’t have to end this way, you know.”

Dan frowns. What did she mean by, ‘killed two of our own?’ As far as he knew, he’d only been responsible for Makhai’s death. When it came to her charges of collusion and defiance however, he’d gladly accept responsibility. Had another member of the Court been destroyed when he’d briefly escaped? Maybe George had done it in his surprise ambush and Eris was merely charging him with equal blame as one did with someone who aided and abetted a crime. He’s not given time to puzzle over her words further because suddenly the sword is flashing murderously bright in his eyes as Eris closes the distance with a furious lunge. He hurls himself sideways on the floor to evade her, but Eris deftly changes direction and snags his shirt. He’s hauled up from the ground in a rush by a bunched fist grabbing the back of his shirt like a cat seized by the scruff of its neck.  She carries him the rest of the way into the room with his feet dangling, easily keeping her grip on both him and the huge sword without any visible signs of exertion. She dumps him in front of the still overturned banquet table, right into a mess of shattered splinters and broken glass, wreckage likely left over from the Court’s confrontation with George. Dan gets to his knees and makes to stand but Eris roughly shoves him back down.

“No, you already had the privilege to behave like someone with distinction able to speak and stand, but as you snubbed our gifts and debased our hospitality in the process, now you’ll stay right where you are, on the floor where you belong, like all other useless animals and clumps of dirt,” she says. “We gave you a chair to sit, we gave you blood to drink and we gave you time to prove your worth. You threw it back in our faces, now you’ll pay the price.”

 “Oh, Daniel, you weren’t very nice after all. That’s really a shame.” Lethe’s voice drifts up from somewhere behind him and Dan quickly turns his head to see her standing at the end of the lopsided table with the hilt of the other white broadsword clutched in her hand. There’s something off about it. It doesn’t glint cleanly in the light of the fire in the hall like Eris’ sword and it takes Dan a second to realize that’s because the blade is smeared with dark blood. It takes him another second to realize both the sword and Lethe are positioned over the prone body of a person on the ground, someone wearing dark trousers and a shirt with its sleeves bunched up to the elbows.

George.

He isn’t moving and there’s a puddle of blood under his body which continues to spread out in a widening pool. It seems like far too much for him to heal whatever critical injury had caused that wound before the rest of the blood ran out of his body, leaving him unable to heal at all. Dan’s heart sinks. George had wanted a chance to be his own person in a world imposing its own restrictions for who he could be, and despite his tempted urge to have all the perceived riches and opportunities the Court offered, he’d finally used that chance to defy his would-be benefactors and had paid for it with his life.

Lethe follows the direction of his stare and looks down. “I’m playing sentry to make sure he doesn’t get up again, but after Eris knocked him a good one with this sword I don’t think he ever will. I know Aeacus definitely won’t.”

_Aeacus? That’s right…where is he?_

In a panic, Dan looks around for the last member of the Court, fearful at the idea of finding himself staring back into the nightmare version of Christopher Lee’s face inches from his own, but the ‘wizened judge’ is nowhere to be found.

“George was so quick. Not even Aeacus had time to react,” Eris says flatly. “Centuries of surviving bloody revolts and feudal wars, making it through attacks by the Germans and the invasion of the Beatles, and he finally meets his end at the hands of a common servant.”

“I remember! George went like this!” Lethe pantomimes sweeping the sword through the air in a great arc. “and then Aeacus’ head went-” She shakes one free hand in another pantomimed gesture, this time mimicking the bouncing path of something rolling along the floor. It’s then Dan realizes why she had been yelling something about a head before. After George had leapt up to the mantel to wrestle down one of the broadswords from the wall, he’d apparently wasted no time in leaping down and beheading Aeacus, the member of the Court sat closest to the fireplace and therefore the most likely to attack first if George had given him time to. According to their seating arrangement Lethe would have been next on the list, but at that point Eris must have intervened, leaving Makhai to retrieve Dan while she dealt with the traitor.

“Eris pushed the rest of him in there, head and all,” Lethe goes on to say and points at the crackling riot of the fireplace.

Dan can see something in between the twisting spires of flames, something that if he squints hard enough begins to resemble a charred and blackened skull.

 “I’d push George in now and have done with it before starting on you next, but I’ve never been able to leave the best things for last,” Eris says.

She saunters closer and the sword gleams at her side. “Now, thanks to you, there are only two of us left. If the other Courts decided to converge here and now, we couldn’t do anything to stop them, but when Lethe and I take your blood, that will be a different story.”  The sword hypnotically sways closer before his eyes. “Then we’ll inherit the power and potential Yilmaz passed on to you, we’ll make better use of it than you ever will.”

“That’s what you planned to do from the start,” Dan says and his voice sounds brittle and rasped as he tries to speak through a mouth dry at the sight of the long wide blade inching closer and closer. “You never wanted me to become one of you. You were always going to kill me.”

“Perhaps.” Eris shrugs. “Or perhaps I would have become endeared enough over time to kill one of the others instead and allow you to rule in their place. But you’ll never know which one it would have been. Now there’s only one outcome for you.”

“Go on, do it! Do it!” Lethe gives a fanged grin, excited by either the prospect of draining Dan or watching Eris lop off his head. Dan has an idea it’s probably both.

Eris moves closer. Her funereal smell of floral decay rises in the air, mingling with the powerful reek of fire growing in the hall and Dan winces away from it as he had in the car, desperate to get away from her. She tsks at him and in a savage upward thrust she shoves her knee in his throat and pins him against the table. Dan struggles to claw it away, shoving and scratching wildly with the same frenetic furor he’d used against George, but her knee remains fixed against his throat, crushing his windpipe in a sensation worse than choking on any boiled sweet.

“I told you to stay where you are. Otherwise the cut will be uneven and some veins may not sever cleanly.” The way she talks about his impending death in such a clinically matter-of-fact tone momentarily blinds him with frustrated desperation. He thrashes violently and grits his teeth around a wild yell that lives up to her accusation of him being no better than an animal.

 _Good,_ he thinks, savagely. _If that’s what it takes to get her off me, to get out of here, then fine. I’ll play the part. Let’s go._

He gnashes his fangs and digs his clawed fingers into the knee garroting his throat, hard enough for him to hear the popping creak of her kneecap twisting slightly in its socket of cartilage and bone under her skin. It’s a horrible sound and he hopes after tonight that he never has to hear anything like it again, that he never has to _do_ anything like this again. He’s not sure he likes this small foray into method acting. Playing the part was better when the injuries confined themselves to special effects and when his emotional involvement with a character went no more beyond a well written script he could forget about after the director called a wrap. Here, stuck in a brutal role he’d never auditioned for, he struggles not to lose himself once again in a vicious tide of power and animal instinct that feels uncomfortably natural and repellent in equal measure.

Eris startles at the grip twisting her knee out of true and gives a small yelping cry. The pressure slackens and although his windpipe is still being crushed within an inch of breaking, it’s loose enough for Dan to heave her knee up and shove her back, knocking her off balance to the floor. The sword drops from her hand with a ringing clatter and one red soled Louboutin flies off her foot and goes skidding sideways across the floor. A look of outraged shock crosses her face and she tries to scramble back up, but Dan surges up to his feet before she can and leaps over the upturned length of the table to put it as a barrier between them.

 Or he tries to leap. At the last second, one of the table legs catches his foot mid-stride and he stumbles. The smooth motion of his jump turns into an awkward lurch and he spills over the other side of the table face first into the floor.

 _If Yilmaz’s blood is supposed to imbue incredible power and grace_ , _then I’d like a refund_ , he thinks wearily.

His nose and chin, having taken the brunt of the impact, both throb with a twinging ache to replace the one which has disappeared from his left hand. He can smell a metallic tang in his nose, can taste it at the back of his throat and he isn’t surprised when he feels the wetness of blood seeping from one nostril in a slow thin trail to his upper lip. A human would have a black eye later after being punched in the face by a floor, but as a vampire Dan knows the injury will heal without any residual bruising left behind to remind him of it later. In any event, he thinks having a black eye was nothing compared to losing his head if he remained where he was.

He scrambles to get to his feet as blood trickles down to his lip at a faster rate, hurried along by his own frantic pulse, but a hand suddenly wraps itself around his hair and using it as a handle, shakes him back and forth like a rag doll until his scalp goes numb and his knees rock back into the floor from the bright shock of pain which abruptly shifts from his face to his head.

“Bad Daniel!” Lethe yells at him from above. Her hand wraps tighter around the tangled coils of his hair and shakes him again for emphasis. “That was terrible what you just did!”

“Where did you think you were running off to?” Eris approaches from behind the table. The sword is back in her hand and her heels are back in place as well. There’s a subtle limp when she places weight on her right knee however, the one which had previously been shoved against Dan’s throat before. It’s a minor detail, but he takes it as a small victory of his struggle, if an ultimately ineffectual one.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Eris says. “You’re stuck here with us.”

“Then you have nowhere else to go either,” Dan manages to say, when his brain stops reeling enough from being agitated in his skull. “Not with the fire-“

“We’re not without failsafes.” Eris interrupts him with a roll of her eyes at his perceived stupidity. “Did you think our ‘overpriced wank’ limited itself to aquariums in floors and giant mirrors doubling as doors? We have out secret passages and hidden tunnels. There are some not even I know about after so many years of living in this house, but no matter how many there are, you will never use any of them. For you, everything ends here.”

She approaches again and this time Lethe holds him easily in place. For someone who looks so frail of stature, there’s a monstrous amount of strength surging through her thin arms. It’s like being held in the grip of a stone golem. No matter how hard he thrashes and struggles against her, she doesn’t let go or loosen her grip for a second. When he continues his efforts to escape, she briskly pulls his hair straight up in her fist and for a terrifying moment it feels like she means to rip every strand of hair off in her hands, right down to the follicles, taking the top of his head with it. He stops struggling at once and Lethe’s grip slackens but doesn’t let go.

_What does it matter if you don’t have any hair, if in a second you’re not going to have a head to wear it on??_

His thoughts are frayed as they ping wildly about his head and in a foggy haze of pain and desperation he watches Eris come closer, listens to the stiletto points of her heels tocking against the floor, every bit like a clock counting down the last remaining seconds of his life; in his mouth he tastes blood, sharp and pungent and he knows with utter certainty this will be the last flavor he experiences before blinking out of existence forever.

Just as his ears ring with the sound of Eris’ heels and his nose fills with the smell of rotting flowers and bitter iron, it’s then another explosion rocks the house with a bellowing roar and a foundation shaking shudder they all can agree isn’t thunder.

Plaster rains down from the ceiling in white chunks like snow and a few portraits crash down from their metal hangings. A statue topples over in imitation of the larger one which had crushed Makhai. More statues and portraits follow suit in the aftermath of violent aftershocks which rock the house, causing the floor to sway dangerously beneath him. He hears a floor board break with a dry brittle snap and a long hairline fracture travels halfway across the room. Other boards catch it like a fever and emit the same brittle snapping noise. One appears suddenly in front of him and runs right between his knees in the shape of a lightning bolt. In the hallway outside it sounds like half the ceiling caves into the floor with a crash. More glass shatters from the heat of the flames gaining size and ferocity with each passing minute and for a time as smoke fills the room in a blue fog it seems the entire house won’t stop shaking.

“We’re going to die! We’re going to die!” Lethe cries out in alarm, her hand still tightly wound in Dan’s hair despite her panic and Dan is only surprised she doesn’t start to go on about termites again.

“Oh, I don’t know about us, but he definitely will.” Eris looks down at him with an expression that’s no longer dispassionate, but unequivocally feral and vicious. “We could have given you the world. Now I’ll give you everything you’ve apparently always wanted from the start. You crave death so badly, you can have it.”

She raises the sword high and Lethe wrenches his head back to extend his neck in a long, clear line of a target for the blade to strike. It hovers above him, reflecting the hot glare of the flames now licking at the open doors and in the moment before it comes rushing down towards his throat as the house continues its tremored shudders around him, Dan thinks of incandescent Supertrees in Singapore, he thinks of a small flat with tetchy faucets in Manchester, thinks of a larger flat with too many stairs and glass doors in London; he thinks of extended breakfasts lasting into the afternoon and longer takeaway dinners sat in front of the television with Game of Thrones playing on the screen; he thinks of pancakes and weird kid stories and One Direction interviews in concrete bunkers.

He thinks of home, thinks of Phil and then closes his eyes.

 

❧

 

In the velvet lined shadows of the passageway, Phil can barely see two feet in front of him. If not for the torch on Susan’s phone which she holds up above her head like an Olympic runner, he thinks he’d probably be stumbling over Cavall every few steps forward. Electric lamps line the walls at evenly spaced intervals, but if they had ever once worked before they’re dark now and he doesn’t see any light switches to try to activate them either. The bright pencil thin beam from Susan’s phone works well enough to lead them on however. Although in one of the small pauses of darkness when her arm tires and she quickly trades off the phone to her other hand, he nearly does trip over Cavall who gives a barking yip when Phil accidentally treads on his paw.

“Sorry, sorry!” Phil immediately stoops to pet Cavall’s head in apology, but in the darkness he misses and ends up patting Cavall’s nose instead.

Cavall doesn’t seem to mind and barks again, with a sense of graciousness as well as with a tone of emphatic urgency. _It’s cool, no worries_ , he seems to imply, _but let’s hurry._

It seems like sage advice and Phil takes it to heart immediately as he quickens the pace, with Susan and Teague following dutifully behind him.

The smell of smoke is no longer just a faded suggestion in the air. It chokes his lungs with every breath he takes and he’s reminded of the memorable time in university when he’d accidentally melted a toaster into a charred ruin, not only overcooking the toast he’d forgotten was in it, but also leaving the entire dorm to fill with a dense canopy of smoke which had set the fire alarms off with a shrill eardrum bleeding series of beeps he swears he can still hear to this day. That day, just as now, he’d been overwhelmed with a corrosive, malodorous stench and he thinks if the alarms had not gone off to alert anyone of the danger, the toaster would have likely set the entire house on fire. There are no braying alarms here, but he already knows there’s a healthy blaze growing to prodigious size beneath their feet, branching out from floor to floor in a mad race to devour the house with them in it. Not to mention the mysterious presence of fire already on the same floor they were on, according to Fergus’ bullhorn-like declarations. It’s a present danger he can’t ignore, but he tries to, impossible as it is to do anything about it right now. The only pertinent thought running through his head is the goal of making it to the end of the passage, finding the exit and in turn finding Dan somewhere on the other side. What he’d have to face once he made it through and how he meant to deal with it was another story, but one he’d worry about when he had to, not a moment before.

More trails of smoke settle in his chest, tightening his lungs with a quick spasmodic jerk and for a while when he pulls up short to try to breathe, the din of his ragged coughs fills the narrow passageway. He has no idea how career smokers handled the job with such dedicated enthusiasm and then thinks addiction and force of habit probably had something to do with it. In his head he passes along a mental note of gratitude to his mother for discouraging his alliance with ‘The Boys’ before he’d decided to make Mayfairs his lasting personal trademark instead of cat whiskers.

“You alright?” Teague pauses behind him and places a hand on his back. Susan stops as well and points the beam of her torch at the ceiling to diffuse the light into a small nimbus around them.

“Fine,” Phil says and as soon as the word is out of his mouth his chest tightens with another sporadic coughing jag.

“You’re ‘fine,’ yet you sound like you’re about to hack up your soul through your mouth.” Susan smiles wryly. “Feel like I’m about to do the same actually.”

“ _Humans._ Always on about their need to breathe. “I don’t get it personally.” Teague rolls his eyes exaggeratedly and smirks.

The coughing fit passes and Phil straightens up again with a shuddering breath, his eyes prickling at the corners from the acrid sting of smoke in the air. “I’m okay,” he says and swallows back another dry cough tickling at the back of his throat. “I’m alright, really. Let’s-”

He’s about to say “let’s go” when a thunderous explosion rips through the house and the narrow corridor around them gives way to an all-encompassing tremor, shaking the light fixtures along the wall and knocking Phil sideways off balance into Teague who only just manages to keep them both from careening to the floor. The torch light in Susan’s hand strobes wildly around them as she scrabbles along the wall next to her for purchase to keep from falling over as well, not without a litany of panicked curses to punctuate her terror. Dust spills out from the seams where the ceiling meets the walls and as Phil watches, a crack appears in the plaster where it skips and jolts ahead of them down into the milling darkness at the end of the passage. When the aftershocks recede to minute tremors all they can do for a few trembling seconds is stare at each other in shocked silence. Cavall skitters in circles at their feet, barking in shrill piercing tones to communicate he felt as equally shocked and terrified as they did. Another hitching jerk of his lungs alerts Phil that the odor of smoke around them has become markedly stronger, no longer just a melting electric stench of one burning toaster, but an entire warehouse full of them, a warehouse which would soon be crumbling to a fiery ruin.

“God, what was that? _What the hell was that?_ ” Susan gasps and the torch continues to tremble in her hand giving the blue white glow around them the sputtering flicker of a dying candle.

“Who knows?” Teague says and although he doesn’t need to breathe his voice sounds breathless regardless. “It could have been the stoves in the kitchen, another gas line in the basement, half the liquor storage going up faster than we expected it to with the rest soon to follow-take your pick. Either way, it’s clear. The whole fucking gaff is set to come down any second. We’ve got to move!”

No one stops to question the wisdom of this suggestion. They’re all agreed, time is of the essence and as they quicken their pace from a jog into a dead run down the hall with Susan’s torch light jumping ahead of them, Phil hopes when it came to the question of time, that they still have minutes left to spare to make their escape. It doesn’t occur to him that perhaps they all might not make it out of here tonight, that in matters of life and death not everyone fared lucky; fate regularly took its fair share of causalities without thought or compassion, especially when it came to a showdown with a council of vampires who spared neither thought nor compassion for others in the first place. It’s an idea he’s long since repressed down into the depths of his subconscious, stored away with all other dark worries and uncomfortable realities he didn’t want bothering him in the middle of the night with their bleak suggestions of misery and death. If his thoughts really had a chance to shape his reality then he’s determined only on making them good ones. They’ll pull through this, even if he doesn’t know the particulars for how. Survival is his only objective, for him as well as for the people with him. He runs through the stumbling beam of light with this conviction swelling in his chest, stimulating his muscles to carry him forward on a blinding rush of speed.

The passage stretches on ahead of them in a seemingly endless sprawl of shadows and Phil isn’t sure how far they’ve traveled, if it’s been many feet or many yards. He imagines it hasn’t been too long and that his sense of haste, of wanting to have already arrived at the door which must lay at the other end, has made it seem longer than it actually is, in the same way any child bored out of their mind on a road trip and yearning to be at the promised theme park or long awaited movie feature would fall to asking, ‘are we there yet?’ before the car had even turned the corner out of their driveway. He tries to will the end of the passageway to appear before him. He’d read about the benefits of visual manifestation before and he focuses hard on imagining a door zooming up into view before him, one with an easily accessible handle he could turn to swing open into a room where Dan would be safe and sound, ready to leave this house and this entire night far behind them.

His mind drifts in time with his whistling breaths. On the inhale he sees the door. On the exhale he’s opening it. On the next inhale, he’s stepping over the threshold. On the next exhale, he’s running back through the smoke and the flames with Dan keeping perfect stride next to him, shadowed closely by Susan, Teague and Cavall; all of them making it out in time to watch the house crumble to the ground.

His visualization technique is so powerful he doesn’t see the end of the passageway rise up before him even as Susan calls out a warning to him and without warning he smacks directly into it. Or rather, into the brass floral sculpture on a pedestal that’s suddenly appeared in front of him, because there is no door to be found. Only the brass effigy of what appears to be a bouquet of hibiscus flowers and the smooth seamless wall behind it.

“What’s this doing here,” he asks, dumbfounded and more than a bit frustrated at the absence of a visible entrance. He’s tired of playing games and riddles; of navigating through a confusing panoply of rooms, tunnels and hidden corridors. The brief novelty of imagining himself inside an escape the room game has passed. Just let it be over with already. Let him be able to get Dan and leave.

“Someone’s into tropical tourist garb maybe?” Teague dryly suggests as he peers around Phil’s shoulder at the flowers. “If it’s anything like what we just went through I’d say it’s another fancy lock masquerading as a statue.”

Susan groans and rubs her forehead in weary circles with her free hand. “Please. Not another puzzle. I already had enough with the one before and the Wi-Fi’s signal gone to shit now besides. If we have to decode another cryptogram I’ll rip this thing off the pedestal and smash our way through the damn wall. I don’t care if it shoots out spikes and sends a boulder crashing down after us.”

“I’ll smash it into the wall myself if it comes to that, but I don’t think it will,” Teague says. “It can’t be that difficult to get through considering this thing is meant for the person who managed to correctly guess the way in here in the first place. Why complicate things further?”

“You’re talking about people with pantries filled with food they don’t need to eat and more chandeliers than a Vegas casino. Complicated isn’t the word.”

Teague shrugs in easy agreement. “Yeah, can’t argue there.”

As they talk, Phil carefully looks the statue over, studying it for any visible grooves out of place from the rest of the texturized patterns decorating the broad petals and stems of the flowers. At first, he finds nothing and is about to say so in a wavering, frantic tone until he sees a leaf oddly jutting out of symmetry from the rest. It’s a subtle detail, but a noticeable one all the same, and he’s sure it has to mean something. He reaches out one hand, less carefully than he had with the lion’s mouth, emboldened by the lack of sharp fangs to give him pause and abruptly presses the leaf down with an experimental touch. It immediately gives under the pressure of his fingers like a depressed lever and clicks into place lower on its adjoining stem. Almost at once, the sound of ticking gears and clunking thuds comes from behind the pedestal. The wall which had seemed perfectly solid moments before, shunts sideways to the left, much faster than the trundling panel with the lion’s head. A rectangular entrance appears before them, framing an incandescent white glare beyond its threshold like every movie production’s version of heaven. It lights up the darkness of the passageway around him in a glow that assaults his eyes, but he doesn’t wait for his vision to adjust or pause to consider the dangers of running blindly through the light to see what was in it before he does exactly that. He’d waited too long to arrive at this moment to hesitate now. Teague calls out anxiously for him to wait, but Phil doesn’t hear him, wouldn’t have stopped even if he had, and instead he rushes on through the effulgent pall of brightness to soon find himself faltering to a stop in a cavernous room twice the size of Cassandra’s gallery.  
Monochromatic color schemes in interior design must be a big hit with vampires or at least with the Court, because just as the notorious ‘golden hall’ had been dipped in a single overpowering shade of burnished gold, this room is painted in an equally resolute shade of white like standing on the inside of a fancy porcelain egg. It’s this startling pale brightness as well as the ungainly diamond chandelier overhead refracting the color back into a million faceted points of light he deems mostly responsible for his squinting eyes as he struggles not to be blinded.

When his eyes finally accustom themselves, he can now see the nauseating wreaths of smoke as well as smell it. His chest clenches at once and he has to swallow back another overpowering urge to cough. The smoke is bad enough, but more disturbingly, the open doors to the room show a roaring nightmare of flames peeking through like a crowd of nosy neighbors looking for a row. The wood molding around the doors, full of spiky protrusions which look strangely like darts, are already blackened and smoking from the punishing heat of the fire. In a few more moments it too would be aflame and then the fire would make quick work of traveling the rest of the way inside the room to turn the white stucco walls into a monochromatic shade of black ash instead. It’s not only the fire which presents a threat. The floorboards beneath his feet are full of deeply etched fracture lines running the full length of the room in uneven marks of latitude and longitude, all of them likely caused by the explosion earlier which had sent a similar crack running down the walls in the hidden passageway to hint at the fast disintegrating stability of the house’s structure. Looking at the floorboards, it’s clear to Phil that one wrong move, another untimely explosion, a crucial support beam succumbing to the flames at the wrong moment and the floor would surely collapse. But it’s the figures positioned behind an overturned banquet table surrounded by the strewn wreckage of shattered glass and broken statues which immediately draws his attention until he completely forgets about both the unstable floor and the looming fire.

It feels as if he’s walked in on a wild RP session that had quickly gotten out of hand. There’s a person, what looks to be a boy in a formal work uniform, lying face down in a dark pool of blood. Phil doesn’t recognize him, but his heart tightens regardless, unprepared as he is to come face to face with such a brutal scene. Blood in horror movies was all well and good when it was confined to the illusory realm of special effects, but to see it here framed in stark reality like a grisly tableau encompassing every thought about death he studiously tried to avoid, makes a shock of cold dismay pebble his arms in goose bumps. There are also two other people in the middle of the room. These by contrast are alive, both of them gathered around a third kneeling figure on the floor. One of them, a woman in red soled heels and a long waterfall of black hair down her back, holds a giant specimen of a sword upraised in her hand and Phil has time to think, _wow, where is that going?_ before he realizes the downswing of the blade is aimed directly at the taut bend of the kneeling victim’s neck. He wonders why the person doesn’t struggle to pull away and then notices they’re being painfully restrained by their hair, courtesy of the second figure in a purple shirt standing behind them. He can see the face of this person clearly and he gets another shivering twinge of unease at the wide staring eyes looking manically gleeful as they stare down at the throat slated for pruning. It’s a hungering greedy expression, the same way he imagined he must look when sat in front of a hot plate of chicken tikka masala after not having eaten anything else for the entire day. However, there’s something about the kneeling person’s beleaguered face which draws him away from the purple shirted figure’s ravenous stare. The woman with the sword standing in front blocks half of the face from view and a sheet of dried blood obscures what features Phil can manage to see around her. But then the person moves, inclining their head to the side with a small heave of their shoulders as if they were resigned to their fate and with a cantering boom of shock Phil recognizes the ¾ profile immediately as Dan. Even behind the flecked blood and smudges of ash, there’s no mistaking the soft shape of his cheek and the small undulate curve of his nose as belonging to anyone else but Dan.

His eyes are closed. He hasn’t noticed Phil. Neither have the two people around him, whom Phil immediately suspects of being vampires, more specifically the members of the Night Court Teague had told him about. On the heels of this swift realization he understands with devastating clarity exactly what they mean to do. Dan had defied them, had also put up a good fight in the process by the looks of the room and the inferno seeking entrance outside. It’s not an act of rebellion likely to go unpunished by creatures with an already twisted sense of moral etiquette if they’d seen fit to interrogate and threaten Dan for doing nothing more than trying to protect his friend. In another second, the upraised sword will trace a whickering path through the air to bury itself directly in his neck, spilling enough blood to satisfy the vengeful greed of the vampires poised over him. It all becomes clear in a striking moment of epiphany and it becomes just as clear what Phil needs to do next without the need for visual manifestations or positive affirmations to give him extra incentive.

 “ _No time for forethought, only action_.”

The words propel him forward without thinking, compelled by a blinding mixture of pure instinct and unconscious reflex that makes this moment difficult to recall the exact details of later. All he remembers is the physical sensation of reaching into his jacket pocket, closing his hands in a fist around the crenelated quartz of the hippo statue he’d brought with him and then pelting it with every bit of devastating force he can pack behind his arm, directly at the back of the sword wielding vampire’s head.

The hippo connects butt first and ricochets off the top of her skull with an almost comical bounce, skidding across the room into the corner of a far wall on the other side well out of his reach. He doesn’t need it anymore however. His first shot, the only one which had counted to begin with, has done the job. The sword clangs to the floor, its threat for the moment neutralized and the woman grabs the back of her head, dazedly staggering off to the side, safely away from Dan. The uneven stumbling-stomp of her gait puts too much pressure on one heel and the stiletto point snaps in two with the sound of a breaking twig, abruptly spilling the woman to her knees. She rolls over on reflex and sits up, looking around for the source of whatever had just collided with her head, but even as her face turns in Phil’s direction her wide eyes remain unfocused and bewildered. She doesn’t try to stand and Phil imagines it might be hard for her to try with a head probably still ringing like a struck bell from being assaulted with the rear end of a hippo shaped knickknack. Dan opens his eyes and looks just as confused when he doesn’t see the imminent glint of his death sentence hanging over his head anymore, but before Phil can call out to him, to warn him to run, the second vampire in the purple shirt releases their hold on Dan’s hair and launches at Phil, mouth open in a fanged cry of, “bad! That wasn’t nice at all _! Not at all!_ ”  
 A lengthier speech of accusation follows, but in the vampire’s garbled rush of outrage the words come out sounding more like Latinate Simlish than English.

There’s a sword in their hand too, Phil notes dully, the same size as the one which had been poised over Dan, and it swings wildly in the air back and forth like an oversized flyswatter, but one with a dangerously sharp blade currently aimed on a collision course with his body.

He can’t react in time. He hears Teague yell out his name from behind him in stereo with Susan as the figure careens across the floorboards with the sword splitting the air in whistling arcs to match the scream of the wind shredding along the eaves of the house outside. Phil wants to move out of the way, but he’s fixated by the sight of this mad creature bearing down on him with inchoate fury like a dozen ‘Frustrated Joes’ wrapped up into one, all eager to take out their grievances on him. It’s too much happening at once for him to react or try to speak, although he doesn’t think any amount of calm discussion will pacify the scything sweep of the blade or the madly gibbering vampire behind it. The sword whistles up through the air to slice back down in an unstoppable arc towards his chest when suddenly the blade pulls up to a faltering stop as Cavall charges forward amidst a furious volley of ear piercing barks.

“Oh, no! So loud, so loud! Please stop!” The vampire cringes away and tucks their shoulders around their ears to block out the sound of Cavall’s barking snarls echoing over the sound of the crackling flames creeping inside the room.

Cavall advances on, heedless, determinately herding the vampire away from Phil, back towards the overturned table and the fireplace beyond. Teague swiftly appears at the dog’s side to provide his support and as they continue their relentless approach together, the purple shirted vampire stops their anguished pleas for less noise and silently peers at Teague with a stated look of recognition.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Teague says with a nod. “I’m surprised you remember me, you who could barely remember the year or country you were in. But I definitely remember you, Lethe. You were there that night. You helped.”

His voice is low and conversational despite the concentrated glare on his face and his gait is calm as he walks leisurely across the creaking floorboards, but the vampire he’d called Lethe backs away in a floundering panic, more intimidated by him now than the barking dog at his heels.

 “You don’t have anything to say? Didn’t think you’d ever see me again after that night?”     

Lethe says nothing and continues to back away. The sword’s blade droops to the floor in her slackened grip like a wilting flower, all thoughts of retribution apparently forgotten.

“That night, when you helped kill my friend, when he screamed, you said it was too much noise then too. Yeah, I remember. I also remember there were more of you then, a crowd of Court lackeys and stewards like babysitters gathered round to protect you and watch the show. Free admission, come one, come all. But it looks like no one’s around now are they?” He sweeps his hands out to either side to indicate the cavernous room devoid of guards or the presence of any vampires that might be on Lethe’s side. “When the chips are down and there’s everything to lose, looks like old loyalties count for shit, at least when it comes to your doddering lackeys. Well? Nothing to say?”

Cavall keeps barking and Lethe keeps backing away. She doesn’t watch where she’s going and stumbles over the leg of the bloodied figure lying on the floor and it’s only then she finally stops and holds her ground.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says in a quavering voice. “None of you are. It’s bad form, it’s-”

“Not very nice?” Teague finishes her sentence for her. “Tell you what’s bad form, love, killing my friend in cold blood in front of me, just like you were about to kill him.” He points over at Dan still staring around at Phil and the newcomers with a dazed, loopy expression on his face as if he were thinking, _oh good, looks like the lads are all here,_ but without fully registering what was happening or who anyone actually was. By the blood-scoured appearance of his face Phil thinks the stress of whatever trials he’d endured must have knocked his comprehensive skills offline for a bit, but that was fine, they were here now, they were alive (if the worse for wear) and the house was still standing despite the fire razing the hallway outside the room and everything was going to be-

“You’re all not supposed to be here! Your friend died because of his own stupidity and now you’re next!” Lethe yells with startling conviction, no longer speaking in a lyrical, high pitched voice about less noise or ‘not very nice people’; clearly no longer as afraid of Teague as she’d previously been. Her face contorts into a wrathful snarl and the furrowed lines of her anger drops years of age into her face so that she appears much older than her voice had initially portrayed her to be. She looks ancient in fact, but more so, she looks cruel and mad.  
 “You’re all responsible for this! Hurting Eris, killing Makhai and Aeacus! Destroying this house! You’ll all pay for this, same as your friend did! _I’ll make sure you do!_ ”

The sword rises to its previous lethal height in her hand and she tenses like a sprinter at the starting line of a marathon, prepared to lunge herself at Teague and bury the blade in his neck, oblivious now to the barking dog standing between them. Desperate anger has apparently made her deaf and blind to all else save for destroying everyone in the room she perceived to be the sole cause for her distress. But just as her leg twitches with the intent of bolting forward in a mad cap dash of destruction, the crumpled body of the boy on the floor who Phil had thought was dead, suddenly whips out a blood soaked hand and seizes Lethe’s ankle. He must be a vampire Phil thinks, no human could have lost so much blood and continued to move like that. He must also be an ally too, because why would a member of the Court choose to stop one of their own from destroying the intruders responsible for the destruction of their lavish homestead? It’s a brief consolation to know their unexpected ally isn’t dead and an enormous sense of relief sets in, a feeling eclipsed only by the shock of what the boy causes to happen next. He leans in, sets his clawed grip around Lethe’s ankle and wrenches her violently backwards with a pained groan, as if the effort to do so had cost him a great amount of strength he doesn’t have much to spare, but the motion is enough to send Lethe’s attack awry and she goes down hard to the floor like a dropped ten ton weight. Immediately, the fractured wood gives way under the impact with a crackling brittle noise of shattering ice. The boy hears it and in a colossal effort of strain and agony rolls out of the way, leaving a swathe of blood behind in his wake. Then he shudders and with a pained grimace goes still.

 Lethe understands what’s happening a second too late when the ground turns concave beneath her. She scrabbles at the sword, then at the fraying floorboards, desperately clawing about for something to hold onto, but a ragged sinkhole opens up too quickly for her to save herself, instantly swallowing up both the sword and Lethe’s still struggling body. Just before she plummets into a blustering fury of flames from where the fire in the basement had apparently gained ground after feasting on the old antiques and wood moldings on the first floor to hasten its progress to the second, Phil sees her eyes meet Teague’s and a shocked look of reproach passes over her face. It’s a quietly eloquent look meaning perhaps to convey, “ _how could you?? This isn’t very nice at all, you and your loud dog and your ‘not very nice friends’- you weren’t supposed to be here, this wasn’t supposed to happen!_ ” then she’s gone, slipped from view down into the burning depths of the second floor below.

Phil watches it all unfold with a distant kind of fascination. He can’t help it. The entire evening has been one prolonged spectacle after another, providing enough fodder for videos and time passing conversations at the hairstylist’s to last him years. He can envision himself well into the future surrounded by a gaggle of ogle eyed grandchildren seated on the floor at the foot of his rocking recliner, gathered round to hear the tenth retelling of the time granddad Phil had inadvertently blown up a vampire in a gas explosion, solved a deadly cryptogram on a time limit and narrowly escaped another sword wielding vampire before she’d dropped like a stone into a hole in the floor of a burning mansion. If he were ever to write a book about everything that had happened to him tonight and about all the events leading up to it, he thinks it would likely become a bestseller, if not prompt a few investigations by government special operatives in the process. He’s still terrified, still choking back the urge to collapse to the floor in a hacking coughing fit as the smell of smoke around him graduates from that of a warehouse full of burning toasters to an entire high-rise full of them, but he’s also strangely ecstatic, albeit in a cautiously subdued way. In the course of a single evening, his entire life, all their lives in fact, had been thrown into the middle of an adventure of death defying proportions spanning revelations and unprecedented outcomes likely to shape the course of his future for years to come. It’s difficult for him then not to stare and be caught up in the adrenaline surging excitement of the moment. Having been able to survive up to this point allows him the reprieve of thinking this way and he relishes the overwhelming satisfaction of it, to be alive, to have finally broken through the house’s many defenses to finally reach Dan at last. He had willed it to be so, had dedicated every breath and thought to the effort of persevering by however means possible to make this goal a reality and here he was.

He looks over at Dan and this time, when their eyes meet, a look of true, radiant familiarity crosses Dan’s face and it belies the dried blood smeared down his forehead and below his nose to give him a ravaged, haunted appearance like a harrowed specter. Yet, underneath the grime and gore, Dan’s sideways smirk of a smile and small heaving sigh of relief reassures Phil that it’s not a specter at all, that despite everything Dan is still present and accounted for as nothing more or less than the person he’s always been, the person Phil had gravitated towards from the start for his caliber of kindness and character. Despite Teague’s and Jorin’s admonitions, the Night Court hadn’t succeeded in drawing Dan over to their side. He remained, as always, his own person; he remained human despite having become a preternatural creature that wasn’t human at all. Underneath the guise and definition of the monster he now supposedly was, Dan remained at his core the same precocious, clever young man Phil had first met so many years ago online. Their individual ordeals hadn’t changed the integral essence of who and what they were at heart, even if their lives had been forever drastically altered for it. This idea above all else, gives Phil a dizzying sense of joy, a fierce and unshakeable triumph greater than the small worry tugging at his thoughts as the smoke rises and the fire swells behind them. In Dan’s level expression he sees that same triumph reflected back. Their thoughts are plainly in tune, their understanding immediate and complete.

They’d made it, individually and together, despite the odds, despite their doubts, they’d made it.

He’s so focused on this elated feeling of achievement that at first he doesn’t understand why Dan’s expression segues from a smile to a startled look of abject horror until a cold, iron strong arm wraps itself around his throat and yanks him into a choking headlock.

“Dan-!” is the first word out of his mouth, the first thing he tries to say at least, but the arm pulls tight, clutching his windpipe into the crook of the elbow and strangling his voice into a ragged gasp.

“No words from you, Phil. No need to move either. I think you and your band of misfits have done enough tonight already.” A smooth voice murmurs in his ear, one he doesn’t recognize although the person clearly seems to recognize him and when he chances a darting look sideways, he sees a swatch of long dark hair in his periphery, the same as the woman who had been on the verge of bringing her sword down on Dan’s throat when he’d first entered the room. In the heat of the moment they’d forgotten all about her and while they’d stood basking in the seconds of victory and relief which had followed Lethe’s demise, she’d been biding her time to strike until now. He dares to turn his head a fraction of an inch more in the woman’s direction to see her more clearly, but she bears down again with her vicelike arm and he gags for air.

Dan struggles to stand and at his incoherent shout of alarm Teague and Susan whirl around from where they had been staring mesmerized at the hole in the floor and for the first time notice Phil’s captor standing behind him. Teague’s reaction is swift and vicious. He snarls in unison with Cavall, his eyes immediately flooding with shadows and he takes off across the floorboards, each one creaking and swaying dangerously beneath him as he runs at her, but the woman holds up the sword in the hand of her other free arm and waves it at him in the manner of a disapproving mother wagging her finger at a misbehaving child.

“No, I think not. Unless you’d like me to kill him here and now.”

Teague’s hands shape into rigid claws at his sides, clenching and unclenching the air restlessly between his fingers, clearly still bristling with the urge to attack, but he stops where he is. Dan however lurches forward on unsteady legs and makes as if to rush her anyway, but Teague reaches out at once to snag his arm and stop him. For a moment Phil thinks Dan is about to throw Teague off, to knock him violently to the ground if need be. His eyes are black with rage and now, instead of a harrowed specter, he looks the spitting image of a feral predator. He directs this newly transformed rage at Teague who, despite his own initial frothing anger, startles badly and without further argument releases Dan’s arm and steps back. He says nothing, seems to think it better not to try when he’s not sure if Dan’s mindless shark like stare has anything left behind it to reason with, but the look on his face pleads for Dan not to make a reckless decision he might regret later on. Phil meets Dan’s eyes again, looking past the milling darkness of blind wrath there for a sliver of equable humanity he could appeal to and, just as he thought he would, he finds it. Dan calms. Nothing changes about his eyes or his unsettled frown, but a silent flicker of communication passes between them, an indecipherable code not even they fully understand the language to. It’s clear in a moment of pure, inexplicable understanding they instantly agree on the same idea without the need to decode or translate each other’s intentions. He knows Dan can’t read his mind; there’s nothing happening between them except a normal transmission of social cues made of body signals, expressional tics and meaningful eye contact to form a dialogue only they know the words to after so many years spent in each other’s company to know exactly what the other means without having to say  it. It all takes no more than a few seconds, but Dan visibly relents, for the moment suppressing his frustration to do as Teague had suggested.

He looks at Phil a moment longer, communicating in no uncertain terms how unhappy he was with this arrangement, how he’d concede the stalemate temporarily for Phil’s sake, but if things changed, if things quickly got out of hand…

 _Then do whatever you feel is right_ , Phil tries to communicate back. _I trust you._

Content with this perceived response, Dan shifts his stare to the vampire over Phil’s shoulder and his fangs gnash together as he addresses her in a resonant voice just short of a spitting growl. “Let him go, Eris. You want me, I’m right here.”

“Such a chivalrous offer from a smart mouthed whelp,” Eris says. “You had your chance to offer yourself up to us before and you refused. I wouldn’t want your hard efforts to be for nothing, not when your Phil has presented a much more enticing opportunity of entertainment.”

Dan twitches forward, an involuntary reflex brought on by her words and Phil’s eyes roll back into his head as Eris tightens her grip another inch more. Dan abruptly jerks backwards, hands raised in an open palm gesture of reluctant surrender and the arm around Phil’s throat loosens, allowing him to heave in a trembling gasp of air.

“Very good, that’s right. You understand. Now then, all of you- over there by the wall.”  
Phil can feel her head give a curt nod to the side, indicating the wall with the secret entrance they’d just entered the room from. “George, you too. I know you’re alive, if barely. Teague can help you stand and walk. Or he can drag you, I don’t care which it is. Quick march now!”

The weakened floorboards restlessly creak in synchronous time with Susan and Cavall’s steps as they wind their way towards the wall Eris had pointed out. Teague slowly follows behind, supporting George’s arm over his shoulders to help him limp his way along as well. They pull up short when a floorboard seems to bend too precariously under their feet and Teague sidesteps it to lead them around to a more stable portion of the floor to walk around instead. It’s a slow going process of testing each board before putting weight on it. The entire floor seems to have weaned considerably since the hole had opened up and the fire below them, likely working its way up into support beams and vital moorings, isn’t helping their situation. Dan tries to follow the rest of the group over, but Eris abruptly stops him.

“No, no. You’re the guest of honor tonight, Daniel. You don’t have to stand with the rabble. You should have the Lord's Room honor of the best seats in the house. Especially when I want you to have the perfect view.”

“The perfect view for _what?_ ” Dan’s eyes remain dark opaque pools in his face, but he looks worried, a sensation Phil empathizes with easily.

“You gave us such a show tonight, I wanted to return the favor,” Eris says and her voice is a grating mocking tone in Phil’s ear. “But I mean to put on a real show this time, not a mimicry of one. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even volunteer to join in.”

“Not likely.”              

“Many things aren’t likely, Daniel. Who was to say that one of Yilmaz’s new bloods, nothing less than a paltry entertainer on the internet, could have brought down the Court through bumbling mischance and fool’s luck? Who was to say his…’friend’ would find himself in my grasp shortly after with a bounty full of hot blood pulsing under his throat, merely a bite away from my fangs?” Her mouth draws close to Phil’s neck for emphasis and the uncomfortably humid breath of her voice tingles along his skin. Then he feels two dagger points of fangs dimpling his throat, threatening to pierce through his jugular and he grits his teeth against a shudder.

Dan makes to jerk forward again and Eris raises the sword again, her mouth never moving from Phil’s throat.

“Ah ah ah! What did I say?” She waves the blade at him and he takes a step back. “I wonder what your Phil tastes like? Hm? What do you think? Sweet, spicy, tangy? What kind of flavor profile is running through his veins?”

Dan says nothing, remaining in a state of such perfect stillness he reminds Phil of an ominous statue that had been carved with nothing but menace in mind. He could have been one of the many Grecian effigies scattered throughout the house, a modern day version of the Apollo Belvedere in the golden hall they’d left behind, albeit one with more clothes and a more intimidating facial expression.

_Beware….beware…_

A subconscious memory tickles at his thoughts bringing with it a warning spoken in the tone of a thousand whispering voices speaking at once, but Phil brushes it aside, too fixated on the arm at his throat and Eris’ words zinging by his ear like a wasp he can’t swat away.

“You’d know all about the flavor, wouldn’t you?” She continues. “Oh yes, you know very well. I can smell your mark on him. You’ve bitten him before. But taste is such a subjective experience, why don’t I take a bite and see for myself?”

At that remark, Dan makes a guttural rattling noise low in the back of his throat. To Phil it sounds like a tiger’s chuffing vocalization of a friendly greeting, but there’s nothing friendly about the look on Dan’s face and Phil thinks the grating rattle was most probably due to a vitriolic epithet he’d swallowed back at the last second. Eris for her part seems to interpret the gist of it well enough because she laughs and draws her head away from Phil’s neck.

“No? You’re right. That would be rude of me. In fact, I think you should do it instead.”

Phil’s eyes widen perceptibly and he sees Dan mirror him.

“How much blood did you lose tonight, Daniel? Enough to pique your hunger? I’d say so. Yes, as a matter of fact you’re probably starving right now, you can probably feel the pull of the thirst traveling along your bones and singing in your veins, crying out for more blood, and what better entrée of choice to indulge yourself with than the hot blood of this human right here? You’ve sampled him before. You already know his blood is to your liking, why shouldn’t you take your fill?”

She presses on in an encouraging croon. “You’ve accomplished so much tonight: you’ve destroyed us, diminished us and ruined one of our most prized estates- why shouldn’t you celebrate with a carafe of good, human blood? It’s right in front of you. You can take it whenever you please. You should do it right now. The time is ripe; the opportunity waiting for you to seize it. You’ve brought down fire and chaos in your wake, you’ve made the oldest, most powerful vampires among us fall before you- a drink then to toast the victor, a fount of blood to celebrate. Drink of it, Daniel. Listen to me. Hear what I say, understand what I mean. Listen to me and drink your fill.”

Dan sways where he stands and his face listlessly drags into a drowsy heavy-lidded languor Phil recognizes all too well. Eris is trying to put him under a glamour, trying to compel him to follow through with every word she says just as Teague and Ashton had done before and it seems to be working.

Teague calls out to Dan and in response Eris seizes Phil tighter around the throat and at his strangled cry Teague immediately falls quiet. Even Cavall seems to understand that barking would only make matters worse as he settles into a low rumble of growls by Susan’s feet, his ears pressed flat against his head and his fur bristling into static charged quills along the hunched curve of his spine.

“You’re a ravenous, powerful, conniving creature with a hunger you can’t deny,” Eris says. “Take only what you’re owed. Drink, Daniel. Take him and be done with it. You should do this. You know it’s only right, only befitting everything you are.”

Somewhere in the hall outside the room comes a splintering crescendo of breaking wood as something, perhaps part of the ceiling or a portion of the wall, caves way to the growing flames. Susan and Teague flinch back at the sound but Dan seems not to hear it at all. When Phil tries to catch his stare all he gets in return is a blank, unseeing void. There’s no warmth of familiarity behind it, not even the heat of rage. The palpable frisson of silent communication he’d been able to establish before is gone. What’s left is a hollow shell Eris continues to fill with her whim instead. There’s a trace of stubborn will left behind however, a resilient awareness of his own independence Dan struggles to reinforce against Eris’ words, but it’s a battle he seems to be quickly losing. His frown relaxes into a drunken, desultory pout Phil would find amusing in any other circumstance. He looks as if he’s contemplating philosophical quandaries of great importance where the solution was guaranteed to decide the question of universal purpose once and for all, but on not being able to figure it out he seems on the verge of a full blown tantrum. His lower lip sticks out further in a childish moue, then, just as quickly, the mood passes and his brow smooths over into empty compliance. He flickers back and forth between these shifting desires, to resist Eris’ suggestions and then to give into them. He takes a shivering step forward, his mouth half open to reveal how long his fangs have grown with induced hunger, but then he takes the same shivering step back and closes his mouth back into a twitching frown.

Eris doesn’t appear put-off by his resistance and instead steps up the ante. “What are you then, Daniel? Are you not confident in yourself, proud of your own abilities and achievements? Do you not think you’re due a reward for a job well done? Don’t underestimate yourself. All this time you’ve taken great pains to express to us how proud and resilient you are. Drink, Daniel. Drink and be assured of your victory. Know yourself and in knowing be exalted and satisfied.”

Dan takes another shivering hesitant step forward, but although his face twitches along to an unsettled argument in his head he doesn’t take a step back again. Phil tries to imagine what he must be thinking or seeing as Eris continues her ingratiating speech, imbuing each word with the force of her persuasive stare, willing Dan to listen, to obey.

Phil can imagine it clearly; can replay every detail with unsettling clarity if he allows himself to remember his confrontation with Ashton. He can feel the pressured weight of invisible bonds weighing his thoughts down with a numbing fog impossible to displace. He remembers the cold pull of Ashton’s words like a steel anchor dragging along the bottom of his mind, searching for purchase in the slippery walls of his subconscious and finding it with a relentless heave of tension he’d almost been unable to break. He remembers the drowsy murk which had soon after filled his head, lulling him backwards, lulling him  
                    down  
                                further  
                                              and  
                                                      further  
                                                                    down  
                                                                               until he’d been unaware of anything else except Ashton’s voice and all the images and sensations the words spilling into his ears had induced. In Dan’s case he must be smelling Phil’s blood, desperate to bite and to drink in the wake of Eris’ bewitching words magnifying his hunger into a tangible, irresistible force of nature. The argumentative twitches of his face are quickly giving way to an expression that’s no longer frustrated or empty. He’s arrived at his conclusion, clearly made up his mind on exactly what he means to do and Phil watches the evidence of his newfound convictions play out in his next confident step forward. Another step, quicker than the last, and his body follows through with a sloping grace that wasn’t there before. His entire attitude changes to adopt a sly cunning mien Phil doesn’t much care for and when their eyes meet again the message which passes between them is a one-sided conversation of: _Hunger. Blood._ _Want. Need._

“That’s it, come along, Daniel. Take your due. Drink.” Eris pushes Phil forward, bunching her fist in the back of his shirt and handing him out to Dan as if she were offering a bushel of grapes. “It’s yours for the taking. Drink and be fulfilled.”

Dan’s head tilts to the side in an angled quirk like a predator honing in on the liquid thrum of Phil’s quickened heartbeat and with a start Phil realizes he’s seen this once before in a dream. More specifically, a nightmare in which a talking cat had led him into a tunnel filled with shadows and ichorous walls lined with blood until he’d stumble upon a creature he’d thought at first was Dan and then, on seeing the mouth open wide like a steel trap brimming with fangs too long and terrible to be called simply that, had realized wasn’t Dan at all. It’s terrifying to see that same creature staring back at him from Dan’s face in a time and place outside of a dream he can’t wake up from. His jaw doesn’t dislocate itself as the creature in Phil’s nightmare tunnel had, but behind the slackened lips Phil sees the two fangs in Dan’s mouth lengthen out from his gums like a viper readying to strike and his eyes are focused with the same calculating, hungry look. He remembers the chorus of warning voices from the nightmare as well and as soon as he does they ebb out from his subconscious and collect together into an echoing shout of a premonition now turned reality.

_Beware. Impossible boy with an incorrigible heart. Beware._

Only this time he’s sure the voices don’t say “heart” at all. They say, “hunger.” And that’s what he sees reflected in every gesture of Dan’s body; in his mouth widening to accommodate the growing fangs within- irrepressible, incorrigible hunger.

“There’s a fine line between gods and monsters, you know. What we become or are made to be,” Eris murmurs and with a shock Phil remembers he’s heard this line once before in the nightmare too, intonated in the same cold, emotionless voice. “Become both, Daniel. Be the god and the monster. Become what you were meant to be. Become what you are. Drink from him, destroy him.”

Dan yields to her without a flicker of restraint, his fanged mouth easing into a smile of lewd avidity. Cavall lets out a resonant snarling bark and Susan translates its tone effectively with her own resonant shout for Dan to, “Stop! Don’t –!” but if Dan hears her he gives no sign and continues his purposeful advance forward, his dark eyes trained solely on Phil’s throat.

There’s no glass of water at hand to throw in his face to wake him up, no way to appeal to Teague or Susan for help when a single move forward from either of them would mean Eris would crush his throat before Dan had a chance to fulfill her demands, and there’s no way to struggle against the clawed hand clutching his back, but Phil thinks there has to be something he can do. This was Dan after all, not a monster or a god or whatever creature Eris had in mind for him to be. If they had made it this far without giving in, if Dan had managed to withstand the presence of the Court without devolving into the image of malice and predatory instinct they obviously revered as their ideal, then there still had to be a chance. Phil doesn’t know anything about glamour beyond its philosophy of manipulative coercion. He has no idea how it works or why, just as he has no idea how tarot cards worked or why dreams sometimes came true; just as he has no idea how to explain the mechanism by which he was able to establish an effortless stream of silent communication between him and Dan based on nothing more than a pointed look and a knowing smile. It simply _worked_ \- just as their acquaintance and relationship together simply worked. That’s all that mattered. He’s never felt a need to try and find the reason, not when he’s always had a basic idea. All the events leading up to this moment have demonstrated all the many reasons perfectly, without a need for him to catalogue each one into scientific terms to muddle their meaning. It was present in their unified perseverance, in their will to try their best no matter the odds, to take risks when it might have been safer not to, to act according to tenets of compassion and wisdom, to trust and take pride and confide in one another, to continue to live and think how they pleased when those around them had sneered or campaigned against it- their decisions mattered. More importantly, their decision worked and tonight the results of those choices had also worked to bring them to this present moment safe and intact.  If they had defied the odds at every turn throughout their lives, had managed to do the same now when their lives had abruptly taken strange and fantastic turns, then why should that be any different now? Why couldn’t he try to appeal to the version of Dan who was more incorrigible and stronger than his predatory hunger? Stronger even than the manacled grip Eris holds at his back?

He has no idea how glamour works, but it doesn’t matter. They had their own brand of glamour between them, couched on softer principles and philosophies that had nothing to do with coercion. He reaches for it now, steels his will behind his intent and without looking away forces himself to meet the dark maelstrom of Dan’s eyes.

 “When we get back home we should really thinking about moving,” he says. “Maybe think about getting a place where we aren’t being penetrated by noise at three different angles and somewhere with more storage to put all our miscellaneous stuff. Could probably shell out a bit more to put in a feature wall somewhere, maybe even a black toilet in the bathroom.”

Dan pauses and quirks his head again. _Is the prey addressing me? How strange_ , his posture seems to imply. The sly cunning look remains on his face, unmoved by mundane topics about storage and moving, but Phil continues on in the same vein of conversation. Because what else could he say? He doesn’t have specifically tailored moving speeches stored up in his brain to pull out at the exact moment for when his vampire friend might decide to kill him. This was Dan he was speaking to after all, not a troop of soldiers who needed a rousing battle rally before a fight or an audience of theatre critics listening to a Shakespearean monologue they would go on to critique the delivery of later. He and Dan had never needed colorful turns of speech or obscure words to impress or encourage each other. Casual and humorous had always suited them just fine. They’d often had engaging conversations ranging from throwaway comments about ham overload, giraffe noises and Voldemort to more profound but no less blithely handled topics like aliens, robots and universal purpose. This was comfortable and familiar territory for Phil and he suspects for Dan as well and in the interest of cultivating an atmosphere that was comfortable and familiar in a burning house that was neither Phil decides perhaps the best way to reach Dan was not by speaking out of turn from how he normally would, but in following through with exactly what they usually did when together, no matter how strange it seemed.

“We’ve spent about half a decade in that place already with most of it spent listening to a soundtrack of early morning drilling, every single morning, without end, which is long enough if you ask me.”

Dan’s head remains quirked in that unsettling scrutinizing angle as if he couldn’t believe that his ‘food’ could talk, but although his expression remains hungering and feral he doesn’t move forward to capitalize on that hunger.

“What are you doing?” Eris asks by his ear, but Phil doesn’t answer and continues on.

“It’d be nice to leave and start over someplace new. Make a solid beginning of everything to mark this new change in our lives. We’ve had our fun, made our memories, but I think it’s time to make new ones in a new place, a bigger, better one. I think we deserve it. If anything, I think that’s our due for everything we’ve accomplished and achieved.”

He looks down into the bottomless void in Dan’s eyes and smiles. “What do you think, Dan? We leave together and start a new chapter of our lives somewhere else, together. You can’t tell me you’re settled on staying in our old hamster cage forever. You’ve always dreamed of a place where you could really branch out with your aesthetic-you know, the one you’ve always talked to me about with minimalistic spaces, houseplants, moon themed bedrooms-someplace you could be exactly who you are, a place where you could cultivate all your creative aspirations, same as what I want to do too.”

Dan’s stare loses some of its wild, insatiable energy and his quizzical expression seems more as if he’s following along with Phil’s words rather than trying to figure out why Phil was speaking at all. His mouth slowly closes, hiding his fangs behind his lips and he frowns.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’d be wise to stop.” Eris’ voice zings once again at his ear in a hot whisper and she gives Phil a violent shake as if she could in turn shake loose all the words from his mouth to keep him from talking ever again, but he doesn’t stop. Even as the smoke from the fire below and the fire behind him continues to wring his lungs like a rag, stealing each breath and turning it into a ragged wheeze, he doesn’t stop.

“We’ve managed to do so much, but there’s still so much more we want to do. We have so many plans, some we haven’t even really thought about yet and others we’re still working on. And we can do it as we’ve always done. Together. Well, if you want to. It’s up to you. It’s always been, you know. and whatever you decide to do, I’m alright with it. I trust you. That’s never changed and it never will.” Phil’s smile widens and he sees Dan shiver, his expression changing to one of comprehension of the words and their speaker, but his face still not quite clear of the muddled ferocity of his hunger.

 “I trust you, Dan,” Phil says again and the words, “I love you” linger close on his lips to say next, but he doesn’t.

 _Why should I_ , he thinks _why should I, when you already know? When you’ve always known? When trust and love is really the same thing?_

Even if he didn’t mind stating the obvious, there’s a terrible intimacy behind saying the words aloud that Phil refuses to say here in a devastated wreck of a house in the company of a vampire who would cheapen it as soon as the phrase left his mouth. He’d save it for a better occasion, a happier one in which they were safely packed into the new flat he’d spoken of, when it was just the two of them together and he could be as emotionally vulnerable and obvious as he pleased without fear of judgment or voyeuristic eyes to make him uncomfortable.

So when he says, “I trust you,” he packs all the unsaid feeling and warmth of the words “ _I love you_ ” behind it and hopes that somewhere in the roiling depths of Dan’s subconscious, in whatever black hole Eris had pushed him into, that he was listening to the words and understood them for exactly what they meant despite all the things Phil can’t say.   

Dan’s head jerks up and his mouth works with the need to speak, but nothing comes out. He looks more aware now, devoid of its former shrewd savagery and he takes a step back instead of one forward.

“No!” Eris hooks an arm back round Phil’s throat and loops him into a strangling vice. His next words escape as a laryngitic squeak.

“No more from you. I don’t know what manner of human you are, some kind of fay witch or hypnotist, but that’s quite enough.” Eris hisses in his ear. “Daniel, listen to me. You can have your fill of the world as soon as you’ve had your fill of blood. Take him and do it now. Inaugurate this new chapter of your life with his blood. This is everything you’ve wanted. Everything you are. This moment is the culmination of your victories here tonight. So take his blood and be satisfied.”

Dan steps forward and stops. Through the blurring whirl of his vision Phil watches him with a stubborn kind of hope, willing him silently to resist Eris, to step back and throw off her glamour, but when Dan’s head quirks back into its predatory lilt, his heart automatically sinks. Dan’s mouth opens again and he bares his fangs in a silent hiss, his stare zeroing in on the throat pinned behind Eris’ arm.

“Take him. I give him to you,” she says before going on to murmur in a voice only Phil can hear: “Yes, take him, kill him and be damned. You destroyed our reign; now allow me to destroy your life.”

When Dan walks forward again he doesn’t falter and he doesn’t slow. His pace quickens as the distance between them narrows and the smell of Phil’s blood and the sound of his heart motivates him to move yet faster. The entire room, once white is now orange with the blaze of the flames consuming the walls on either side of the doors now and it bathes Dan’s figure in the same lambent, golden-orange glow like a statue of a deity who had walked straight out of the golden hall, perhaps even Apollo himself. And even then, as Dan advances full of murderous purpose and fangs bared with mouthwatering hunger, Phil thinks he looks beautiful- frightening and dangerous, yet beautiful. And of course, why shouldn’t he think so? Didn’t he think all wild tigers and lions to be the same? Even when they hunted, stalking their prey through tall grass on paws made to kill, they possessed a manner of graceful nobility he sees in Dan now. But of course he’d always thought Dan to be beautiful regardless. The light of the fire and the sinuous poise of his transformed nature however elevates it in a way impossible for Phil to ignore.

He’s also aware that he’s merely focusing on one detail in a concerted effort to ignore another more troubling one. That by focusing on the incongruity of Dan’s beauty he’s just trying to distract himself from the inevitable; trying to think of better things rather than the promise of death Dan carries in every quickened step forward, but when Dan reaches him at last and seizes his shoulders in a cold, unyielding grip, it’s difficult to think of anything else except the blank, hollow stare and looming fangs now inches from his face.

“Yes, that’s right,” Eris says to him. “Drink from him. Take everything he has to give.” She releases Phil into Dan’s tightening hold on his shoulders and steps away.

Dan’s mouth hovers close to Phil’s left cheek and slowly marks a path through the air down to where the shelf of Phil’s jaw meets his throat. He remains there for a moment and appears to luxuriate in the scent of blood running in skips and spurts under the skin. He slowly moves to the other side and does the same luxuriating pause. His fangs are so long now, so sharp, Phil notices, extended to their full length in his mouth, waiting for when they could fulfill their function and slide into the main artery of his neck. Phil can’t find anything to say now. Half because the swelling bruise left from Eris’ arm has left a firebrand of an ache in his muscles like a sore throat making it painful to speak, but mostly because he can’t think of what to say in the face of the empty stare looking back at him. It’s a lifeless void where all words would be lost to meaningless echoes. Whatever flash of awareness Phil had managed to spark before is gone, leaving nothing but an atavistic urge in its place. Dan draws him in close with an almost tender gentleness and they’re chest to chest, pressed so close together Phil is sure the reverberations of his thundering heartbeat is traveling through the layers of his clothing to Dan’s ribcage as if it were his own heart thudding away. Even through his jacket, Dan’s clenched fingers radiate a bone numbing cold. It travels up the sides of Phil’s neck to his head like the devastating chill of brain freeze, only this one doesn’t fade away. It obliterates all sounds and thoughts until he can only focus on Dan’s face steeped in blood and terrible beauty as his fanged mouth draws closer.

 _Well, I tried. We both did._ Phil thinks _. And if this is how it has to be, then I guess it’s better than being bitten by Ashton or burning to a crisp. It was an incredible adventure while it lasted though. I hope…I hope if there really are multiple universes out there and if we get to choose where we go after we leave this plane of existence, then I hope I get to choose a universe where you’re there too. So we can start all over again. Side by side, together. If I do, I’ll look for you. I hope I find you. Just like I found you six years ago. I’m willing to do it all over again, because as long you’re with me, it’s fine. It always has been. Even this, even now, as long as it’s you, it’s fine._

He looks back into the hollowed empty stare for the final time and despite the bruised pain of his neck and the icy chill in his head he finds the words he needs and says, “Do whatever you feel is right. I trust you, Dan.”

Then he closes his eyes and waits for the sharp pinch of fangs to pierce his throat.

He’s surprised then when Dan leans in and instead of biting him, he whispers, “you absolute spork. Who else could talk about moving house and renovation ideas in the middle of a crisis except you? Remind me to thank you for that later. And for the record…I trust you too.”

He speaks the last words in a deeper, more meaningful inflection which Phil suspects is also simply an apt cover for the words, “I love you.”

“Don’t know if you’ll trust me after this next part though. So, er, sorry about that.”

Before Phil can puzzle over exactly what he means, can even understand why he’s said it at all, Dan bears down on his shoulders, pivots around in a head whirling rush of speed and fairly tosses Phil away from him towards the overturned table in the middle of the room. It’s a carefully calculated throw despite the abruptness of it and Phil evenly bears the brunt of his impact with the floor on his left side, coming down with hardly a jolt to slide the rest of the way across the floor like a base runner gliding past a shortstop, until he finally comes to a rest with a gentle bump against the table’s edge. He has no time to wonder how the floorboards hadn’t collapsed underneath him as they had for Lethe- if perhaps Dan had marked Teague’s careful winding path and had thereby deemed this part of the floor safe for him to throw Phil on or if perhaps it was merely a lucky gamble that had panned out well despite the odds- he can only watch, stunned, as Eris’ face contorts into a paroxysm of rage and she launches herself at Dan with the broadsword thrust before her like a javelin aimed for his turned back.

Dan whirls around in time to dodge it, darting sideways, but Eris jackknifes just as deftly in his direction without breaking stride and swings the sword in a powerful, cleaving arc. Dan flinches back out of the way, but the tip of the blade manages to catch his upper arm, splitting a gash in the fabric of his shirt and drawing a red line of blood on the skin underneath. Phil has no time to call out a warning, can’t find a way to speak past the steadily increasing collar of pain encircling his throat to try. He can only make an abortive rasp of noise just as Dan feints out of the way of another whistling sword strike, hand clasped to the cut on his arm. His hair, now devolved to an Endymion riot of curls on his head, is plastered to his forehead from the fine sheen of sweat prickling his brow, mostly brought on, Phil imagines, by the stress of trying not to become a human shish kebab more than by the heat of the flames pouring into the room. Phil himself is exhausted simply by looking at him dodge and weave around every whistling strike with an eerie grace Phil isn’t sure even Dan is aware of. His evasive skills are incredible, but although impressed, a part of Phil isn’t surprised. When it came to relying on good reaction times for platformers or rhythm games, Dan always managed to snag a high score with what seemed like very little effort at all. As a vampire, that innate talent had apparently only been magnified. He’s picked up the pattern of Eris’ strikes until they both make a stunning choreography of fighter and opponent, respectively striking and weaving in even time with one another. The floor creaks and squeals in strained tension underneath them, but neither seem to notice. Dan appears more concerned with keeping the hulking sword in Eris’ hands from connecting with his skull, but it’s a hard won dance of wills evidenced by the increasingly strained look on Dan’s furrowed brow.

Phil doesn’t want to think just how long Dan will be able to keep up the defensive before his last dregs of strength finally gave out. It doesn’t help that Eris wields the sword without the mad, undirected ferocity as Lethe had. Each blow is precise, timed to account for Dan’s speed and the direction in which he happens to dodge. As they continue their routine of attack and evasion, her aim becomes more accurate. With each thrusting, downward swing the blade travels an inch closer to delivering a fatal blow rather than a shallow scratch. Vampires clearly had strength and endurance to spare, but there had to be a limit to those capabilities, especially given Dan’s already weary appearance and the amount of blood he’d lost. In a fight against a skilled swordfighter who had the knowhow and strength necessary to easily hold their own, Phil thinks the odds of Dan surviving are decreasing with every second that passes.

Just as he thinks it, Dan barely ducks below a heavy swing aimed at his head and as another strike swiftly lunges for his chest before he has a moment to recover from the first, he staggers and loses his footing. He falls to the floor and looks up, occluded eyes wide and frightened. Phil can only look on with the same frightened expression as Eris wheels the sword over her head with a triumphant leering grin and brings it hurtling down and around at Dan’s neck.

In the middle of its deadly trajectory however, Cavall suddenly flits into view like a furious ghost and lunges his snarling teeth at Eris’ leg. He digs in to the thin bone of her ankle and catches hold, shaking it with the mad furor of a terrier with a chew toy. Above him, Eris shrieks and the sword instantly drops from her hands, but she ignores it and seizes Cavall by the back of his neck instead, pulling him off her leg with a rending yank. Cavall squirms in her grip, his paws batting the air as he tries to reach up behind his head to bite the cold hand holding him in place. She studies him for a moment with a revolted sneer, as if she’d just plucked a leech from her skin, then with brutal ferocity she whirls around and tosses him at the wall.

Phil’s heart stops as the white blur zips through the air too fast for Dan to stop it, but then Susan is there, darting into view with her arms raised and her mac swirling out behind her like an absurd high vis cape and just before Cavall slams into the smoking plaster she leaps up and catches him like a football, cradling him to her chest as the force of Eris’ throw knocks them both backwards the rest of the way into the wall. They smack into it with a dull thud, but Susan manages to keep her feet and when she straightens up again Phil is more than relieved to see Cavall’s furry head perk up from the circle of her arms with a hotly panting, cheerful grin.

In the small window of opportunity afforded him by Cavall’s timely distraction, Teague darts in front of Dan before Eris can turn back around and kicks her fallen sword across the room, straight into the wall of flames behind them. He quickly helps Dan to stand up as Eris faces them again with renewed fury. Although disarmed, she’s no less menacing or dangerous. She stalks forward with her hands fixed into arthritic shaped claws armed with nails just as sharp as the sword she’d lost and every word she says is squeezed through the gnashing cadaverous leer of the sharper fangs in her mouth.

“You rat. You whelp. You worthless, talentless panhandler.”

Cavall’s resonant growls carry across the room from his perch in Susan’s arms and Teague cautiously positions himself to shield Dan behind him.

“You think you’ve won?” Eris asks. “You think your entourage of idiots will save you from me? enjoy your brief victory while it lasts, because if you manage to leave this house alive, your life forever after will remain here to burn with everything else. Killing you would be too much of a mercy, I see that now, not when I can make good on every promise of destroying your life instead. I’ll start with your family then move on to your friends. All those who ever knew you or loved you will see their demise in my face and they will know the only one to blame for their misfortune will be you. I will insinuate myself in every part of your life until it’s nothing but ruins and ash.”

The wall of fire behind her roars in perfect representation of what she means and the combined fury of the blaze and the guttural wrath of her voice, forces both Teague and Dan backwards away from her.

“When I’m finished, when you have no one and nothing left, I’ll have you for a plaything. I’ll have you as my pawn and my pet, collared and brought low until you become less than even the mongrel who bit my leg. I will ensure your every waking moment is one of derision, controversy and hatred. You will be defamed and ridiculed wherever you go. I'll bring you pain such as you’ve never known and when you finally grovel at my feet and beg for death you’ll remember you had your chance. Every time I deny you the privilege, you’ll remember.”

 Each word escapes her throat in a sonorous half yell of hatred. With her lopsided grimace and unkempt hair, she now looks evenly matched with Lethe for madness.

“You’re done, Daniel Howell. Your life and all you are, all you own and love, is forfeit to me.”

Phil knows it’s a bluff. With no one else around but her to level empty threats in a house quickly filling with fire to destroy both it and the Court’s reign forever, Lethe is grasping at whatever show of dominance she can manage to make her seem more powerful than she really is. Her faithful stewards would all have abandoned the house by now and without the Night Court to offer them the promise of power and influence they desired, they would abandon her and move on to other ventures and other Courts leaving her alone to exact her vengeance without assistance; Whereas Dan now had the support of unlikely friends who would step up to defend both him and Phil from an onslaught of intimidations, be they from Eris or someone else just like her. In swift demonstration of this thought, Teague steps forward to confront Eris with his mouth pulled into a fanged grimace like her own.

 “Oh, shut it, will you,” he snaps. “Quit giving it the big I am. _You’re_ done and _we’re_ leaving. You can’t do nothing to them anymore. You can’t hurt anyone else anymore either, not with the Court gone, your stewards scattered in every direction and most of your prized estate smoldering around you. Your allies are gone and even if you used the rest of the Court’s vast treasury of wealth to get things back up and running again, at this point, with just you around to manage things, when the other Courts swoop in to take what’s left, there’ll be nothing to stop them. Not if Yilmaz doesn’t show up to claim it first. But if you ask me, I think it’ll be some time before any Court decides to take up residence in this city again, not with people like ‘worthless panhandlers’ to stop them.”

 He shakes his head. “You know, I always wanted the opportunity to kill you many times over for what you did to my friend. That night, when I came for him, I’d have thrown my life away to kill you all right then, even though I knew I might’ve never stood a chance alone, not when Yilmaz decided not to intervene because helping’s never been her thing. All you old money, power hungry parasites never were big on helping others. I never wanted to have anything to do with you. After too many years spent being a serf toiling away on some aristocrat’s overpriced patch of dirt I wanted my freedom, to have my immortality made in the image of what _I_ wanted it to be, not to get caught up in the affairs of more idiots who wanted to take that independence of will away from me all over again- but killing you was an incredible temptation I’d have made an exception for.” His hands ball into fists at his sides as he continues. “You took so much from so many people over the centuries. You took so much from _me._ But that’s done now and I think you falling off your pedestal to be one of the common 'rabble you so despise is better payback than dirtying my hands with your blood. Now you get to know what it’s like to have nothing and no one to turn to. It’s over. Karma’s come to pay a visit. So enjoy the ride and go to hell.”

Eris’ face twitches and a multitude of expressions flicker into view: anger, pride, befuddlement, indignation and despair, until finally settling back into anger.

“No….no.” Her voice quavers to a low whisper for a moment, but then she laughs and the sound is humorless and jarring. “I won’t be diminished like this. Not by you. I’ve spent so much time, so much work and effort in cultivating the best of our kind- in creating a legacy of unrivaled power, only to let it be destroyed by people like you. You will never be what we were. You will never rise to our level of distinction and supremacy-“

“Good.” The injured vampire who had saved them from Lethe interrupts in a faded voice Phil can barely hear over the snapping racket of the flames. He’s sat on the floor against the wall next to Susan, his face a curdled shade of pale from blood loss. He clutches the ragged gape of the large hole in his shirt which seems to have been made from one of the broadswords after the blade had shoved its way through his torso all the way to the hilt. Blood continues to ooze in a slow thin trail from the shadow of a wound Phil can glimpse through his fingers, but the vampire smiles in spite of it and there’s a certain strength behind that single gesture that momentarily clears the sickly pallor on his face and makes Eris frown.

 “Good,” he says again. “I don’t want to be like you. To paraphrase what someone recently said to me, I wasted fuck knows how many years in this house thinking I wasn’t good enough to be anything but a rank and file servant because I wasn’t at the so called level of ‘distinction and power’ that people like you held in such high esteem.”

 His voice dissolves into a wet rattling cough and he winces, as if the strain of talking was too much for his body to withstand, but the moment quickly passes and he continues. “That same person also said to me freedom and identity go hand in hand, that when you’re comfortable with who you are- when you let the outside reflect who you are on the inside, when you define your authentic self on your own terms without anyone telling you who you are, _that’s_ what it means to live, and I know that now…I know I can live in spite of you. Without you. We will never be what you were and god, what a fucking relief.”

He winces again and falls silent, but his words linger in a concordant force shared between them like a palpable electric charge in the air that Eris must feel too because she flinches and takes a step back.

“You heard him,” Teague says quietly. He continues to stand in front of Dan, shielding him from the unhinged desperation and fury on Eris’ face. “It’s over. From here on out we’re gonna live how we please and not you or anyone else will be able to stop us. I’ll make sure people know what happened here tonight, I’ll make sure it reaches the ears of every Court on every continent so that no one ever dares to try to do the same as you lot did. We’ve our own lives, our own hearts and minds, and none of that will ever belong to you.”

A great portion of the ceiling in the hallway crashes down in an avalanche of spinning embers and scorched wood. It punches through the floorboards on their way down, on into the already burning corridors and rooms of the second floor beneath. The smoke and heat stings at Phil’s eyes, blurring his vision of Eris as she turns to stare at the trail of destruction left behind and at the flames now engulfing the entryway of the room from wall to wall. She takes it all in, hands clenching and unclenching at her sides.

“That’s that, then.” With one final disgusted glance, Teague dismisses her completely and turns back to Dan. “I’ve been banged up, bent up and now I’m fed up. And not meaning to offend or anything, but you’re looking twice as bad.”

“Thanks. Pretty much how I feel, to be honest,” Dan says. “Good to see you again, Teague…”

“Yeah, yeah.” Teague awkwardly rubs the back of his head. “We’re making a fine heartwarming reunion here in the middle of hell’s ninth circle. Or was that the one with all the ice?  I can never remember. Either way, it’s all going to be a fireball in a second with us included if we don’t leave off with the monologuing platitudes. So what do you say, ready to give this place the ol’ V and get the hell out?”

Dan glances over at Phil and in another quick frisson of silent communication they come to agreement.

_Yes, we’re ready. Let’s go home._

“I won’t allow it to end like this,” Eris murmurs in a voice so low Phil almost misses it, then in a strident yell so loud it hurts his ears: “If I must fall…..then, you’ll fall with me!”

She darts at Teague just as he turns around to leave, her clawed fingers outstretched towards him like talons. He spins back in surprise and grabs her shoulders, but not before her nails dig into the shredded remains of his hoodie, piercing through his sleeves and snagging deep in the skin of his arms. He heaves his weight against her with an agonized grunt of pain to knock her back, but her nails hold fast.

“Pathetic abattoir hound.” She spits the insult between her fangs. “You never were good for much, were you?  Nothing but the vagrant village waif, the villein whose life belonged to his lord and master, London’s little busybody of an info broker- of course you’d throw your lot in with others of your ilk, the useless and the lowly. You failed your friend all those many years ago, retreated like the mongrel you are with your tail between your legs. Now you can watch as I destroy your new friends too and perhaps this time you’ll learn not to interfere with the affairs of your betters.” She bears down on Teague and with a wrenching twist of her hands she sinks her nails in deeper.

Teague surges against her with an outraged cry, in turn kicking off a complicated struggle executed too quickly with vampiric speed and violence for Phil to see what’s happening. There’s no calculation or grace to either of their movements. Phil recognizes it for the demonstration of raw panic that it is, with Teague fighting to escape and Eris fighting to bring Teague down with her. They turn and thrash in an overhooking clinch hold across the floor and each dizzying revolution skirts them perilously closer to the flames.

Phil thinks later it might have been better if Teague had snatched up the sword to defend himself instead of kicking it away; if perhaps in the absence of a sword, he should have pushed Eris towards the mountainous flames and allowed the boiling heat to force her murderous grip to loosen, but things always work out for the better in hindsight, things always fall into place without a hitch and no one is ever hurt and no one ever stumbles or falls. Hindsight is wisdom gained too late to matter and sometimes no amount of planning or clever strategy helped to change the course of events at all. Sometimes coincidences were just coincidences and sometimes dreams were so much more and sometimes karma exacted its justice in swift unexpected turns; and then, sometimes, life fell beyond the collective grasp of karma, dreams and coincidence to be completely without order or reason and was then simply, unfair.

All Phil manages to see in the end is Eris tripping over the uneven edge of a furrowed crack in the floor. Teague takes advantage of her stumble and shoves her with a throaty bellow of a roar channeling centuries’ worth of frustrated grief for all his missed chances and lost friends at the hands of the Court. Eris hurdles backwards, unable to stop her descent with her hands still hooked into Teague’s arms like fish hooks. Teague has no choice but to go with her, both of them interlocked in a hateful embrace Teague struggles to escape the entire way down. They slam into the floorboards and there’s a minute when it seems the roar of flames is deafened by the sound of splintering, twisting wood. A crater of a hole opens up, bigger than the one before, and in the next minute both Teague and Eris are gone, dropping through out of sight into the hot twist of fire below before anyone can rush to stop it.

The abrupt shock of it steals the breath from Phil’s lungs and he stares, unbelievingly at the splintered chasm in the floor, as if Teague might yet reach up a hand and ask with a weary, forbearing sigh if someone would please help him up instead of staring around having a gander at the scenery? But he doesn’t appear and in his absence the flames continue to race through the doors up to the ceiling, feasting on the grotesque mural above and charring it to a black ruin of burning paint which begins to flake off in singeing embers and drift down to the floor like snow. Susan presses her back to the wall, holding Cavall in her arms under the skirl of sparks raining down around her, her stare fixated only on the jagged rift where Teague had disappeared. She says nothing but her eyes have a trembling glassy look to them Phil can’t tell whether from the smoke or from her grief. Dan looks just as shell-shocked, unable to say or do anything except to meet Phil’s eyes with a quiet, helpless look.

Phil thinks they might have stayed like that for longer, locked in their disbelief and anguish despite the swirling snow of embers drizzling down at a faster rate from the ceiling, but the smoke is now an asphyxiating miasma making it harder to breathe and Phil knows it won’t be very long until the liquor storage Teague had warned them about would explode when the blaze finally moved to engulf it. When it finally did, then none of Teague’s efforts would have mattered, not if they ended their night of difficult victories by getting blown up because they were too numb to move. The time to reminisce and mourn was later not now and Dan must arrive at the same conclusion as well because he whips around and calls out to Susan.

“That hidden passage in the wall you guys came through- is it still accessible? Can we leave through there?”

“Y-yes.” Susan’s voice wavers and she brusquely wipes the corners of her eyes with the heel of her palm. “The other side locked after we went through, but we should be able to unlock it again to get by. Assuming the fire hasn’t spread to the room over there yet. ”

The floor continues its splintering cracking symphony as the second hole further unbalances the rest of the foundation. Dan looks down uneasily and sidesteps a thin splintering crack that suddenly appears by his foot.

“Not much choice left but to try. We have to go. Now!” Dan looks over to Phil and waves him to hurry. “Come on!”

Phil stands and at his shifting weight the floor grumbles and quakes. He reflexively reaches behind him and grips the edge of the overturned table, the only means of support left to him in the center of the room surrounded by the sounds of fire and snapping wood. He can’t stay where he is, he knows this. There’s enough motivation in the corrosive smoke filling his lungs and the ruined mural now spinning down in a snowstorm of burning embers around his head to push him forward into a flat out run, but he’s unsure if he might go plummeting through another sudden sinkhole to join Teague in the blaze below if he attempts anything beyond a crawl. He lets go of the table and takes a cautious step forward. The floor dips with another shrill squeal of the damaged support beams, bending too freely like rubber instead of solid wood and he immediately jolts back into his fragile refuge against the table.

“Phil, come on! Let’s go!”

He tries again, but finds himself unable to move, utterly petrified of the floor underneath his feet when every creak signals impending disaster.

“I can’t….I can’t.” He says it in a low tone barely a tic above a whisper as if afraid he might unwittingly upset the floor’s rapidly depleting stability by virtue of nothing more than the pitch of his voice.

“Yes, you can. It’s fine. I promise,” Dan says and for the first time Phil notices his eyes are back to normal. “You can do this. You know you can. You’re just freaking out again.”

“I am _not_ freaking out,” Phil mutters. “I’m cautiously skeptical.”

“Oh, is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Of course. Freaking out has nothing to do with it.”

A rolling explosion of thunder shakes the rutted floor in a terrifying tremor and the house answers with a discordant groan of stressed wood and straining metal in a chorus to herald impending disaster. Phil looks up at Dan then, solemn and wide eyed and without a hint of veiled amusement in his voice he says, “alright, it has more than a bit to do with it.”

“Yeah, same,” Dan says. “I know you’re scared, but I’m here so you don’t have to be. At least not alone anyway. We can be scared together.”

“As far as motivational speeches go, that’s…kind of cheesy.”

“Bite me.”

“Without missing a beat Phil replies, “I don’t know about now, but when we get out of this, sure.”

A livid red whorl immediately develops on Dan’s jaw and spreads across his cheeks.  
“Right, who’s being cheesy now,” he mutters and despite the lingering tremors still going on around them Phil laughs.

“Guys- quickly! We need to move!” Susan’s frantic voice carries over the din of the blaze now turning the ceiling into a fiery canopy. She’s stood next to the entrance of the hidden passage in the wall with George who clasps one hand on her shoulder to keep himself upright. Cavall leaps from her arms and paces in a frantic circle on the floor, barking in strident tones of urgency to further underscore her words.

 Phil wills his legs to move as aksed, but they remain frozen in place. Letting go of the table should help and he tries, but in a flash he’s fumbling for the solid edge of it again, the only safe oasis in a fast deteriorating landscape of collapsing foundations underneath him. He’s stricken by panic, too overwhelmed by the smoke and the fire and the thunder outside to move. He looks up at Dan and says nothing; lets his trembling hands speak for themselves.

“Okay.” Dan nods in understanding and his voice is calm and soothing despite the juddering crash of something enormous falling over in the burning hallway behind him. He approaches Phil in an even steady pace across the floor. “I’ll come over to you then and we’ll do this together. Like always. Just look at me. It’s fine.”

The floor continues its unsettled groaning with every step he takes and Phil can’t help looking down uneasily as Dan sidesteps a thin splintering crack that suddenly appears by his foot. It looks oddly like a tree, a large dead one with sinuous branches that begin to spread out and multiply as Phil watches.

“Phil, just look at me.”

The branches fracture off into new winding lines, all crisscrossing each other to create even more complex tributaries. Walking on eggshells doesn’t feel like an exaggerated metaphor anymore and Phil thinks freaking out doesn’t seem like an unreasonable descriptor for his current emotions.

“Phil, please. Look at me.”

“Bit difficult.” The tributaries lengthen as Phil watches and he swallows back a ragged cough tickling the back of his throat, but he tries his best to focus his swimming vision on Dan instead of the crack steadily growing wider under his feet.

“I know, but everything is fine,” Dan says. “See?”

The shattering fractures continue to expand, but the floor holds and Dan closes the distance at last to join Phil in his isolated sanctuary by the table.

“Alright?” Dan looks at him through a face blurred by blood and dirt and inexpressible weariness. Phil immediately thinks, no, it wasn’t alright. He doesn’t like seeing Dan this way, like a harrowed survivor of a great war who had left some integral part of their soul behind in the struggle to survive. He wants Dan to get home and wash away the grime of his injuries clinging to his skin and in doing so, to perhaps in turn help purge the bad memory of this evening’s trials from his mind until he looked himself again. Until then, things wouldn’t be alright at all, but he recognizes the question as the formality it is and he doesn’t reply except to give a curt nod in silent acknowledgement of the severe ‘un-alrightness’ of their situation as well as to convey to Dan that he was ready to go when he was.

“Right. Hold onto me then and I’ll lead us across,” Dan says. He turns to his side and proffers his sleeved arm for support, but Phil reflexively snags his hand instead. The flushed whorl lingering on Dan’s jaw goes red again and he looks surprised, as if part of him had been expecting Phil to grab for an inoffensive piece of clothing rather than to lace his fingers with those of an unnaturally cold hand that had nearly overpowered him as Eris had commanded Dan to do. Phil notices his quiet astonishment and squeezes his hand in a manner he hopes communicates reassurance and unerring trust. Dan’s pallor flushes a deeper shade of scarlet. He looks distinctly embarrassed now and more than a bit self-conscious, but he says nothing. Instead he tries to downplay the burning spots on his cheeks by briskly clearing his throat and taking a step forward with Phil in tow beside him.

 They begin a painfully slow gait across the floor towards the promised safety of the passageway in the wall, led on by Dan who maneuvers Phil away from the tree formed crack reaching for them in ever widening tendrils. They gradually quicken the pace from a crawl to a measured walk, but to Phil, being tugged along in Dan’s wake even at this careful rate of speed feels like doing DDR with their legs duct taped together in some impossible feat of a three legged challenge with him blindly following along in a small flustered panic. He can’t tell which way Dan means to go until after he turns in that direction, leading to an uncomfortable series of staggered jolts and lurching steps. But he knows they have to keep moving and he tries to power on through the smoke anyway, taking a step forward in blind eagerness to reach the passage. Dan quickly yanks him back before his foot can connect and it’s only after he collides with Dan’s shoulder and looks down that he sees a crack in the floorboard he’d meant to step on, one so wide he can glimpse an orange flicker of the flames below. Any degree of pressure set on it would snap the board in two, setting off a catastrophic domino effect through every board next to it. His pulse jitters at the sight of it and he takes a deep breath to calm himself, but ends up inhaling a clot of ash and smoke leaving him bent double at the waist in a fit of painful coughs that aggravates the still throbbing knot in his throat from Eris’ maltreatment. It finally passes after what seems an age. When it does he nods to Dan to signal he was ready to go and once more they continue their halting progress across the floor.

 Whatever lucky synchronicity of communication they had apparently ended at physical tasks where their individual approaches to a situation fell at odds with one another, especially in a situation as dire as this one. When Dan was on his game, comfortably situated in total understanding of what he meant to do and how he meant to do it, his confidence arced up to a frenetic energy level that was at times too intense for Phil to keep up with. He’s glad Dan seems to know exactly where to place their weight on the floor and where it was too dangerous to even try, but as a human, without Dan’s heightened abilities, Phil finds himself completely at a loss, struggling not to hold Dan back while also struggling not to inadvertently send them both falling headlong through another yawning hole. At one point he pulls up short hard when Dan abruptly stops to lead them in a different path from where they’d originally been headed and accidentally treads on Dan’s foot in the process, nearly tripping over it to the floor to make his uneasy thought a reality.

“You know, it’s really not a great time for you to whack out the incoordination skills,” Dan says as he helps to steady Phil, not without a smirk to ease the criticism.

“Well, sorry. Kind of hard to keep my balance when I feel like a flamingo waddling around on one leg at the moment.”

 _Or more specifically, a flamingo waddling around on two left feet trying to escape a burning house,_ Phil thinks.

“Still, awkward leggy bird or not, you managed to make it this far to get to me. So that’s impressive,” Dan replies as they resume their careful plod forward. “Wasn’t sure it was actually you at first when you all burst into the room. When I thought I was going to-” He cuts off mid-sentence and looks distantly troubled at the idea of his next words before he says them.

“Back when I thought I was going to die,” he continues in a softer voice than before, “I had the whole ‘life flashing before my eyes’ experience and suddenly you were there and then I thought I was having some kind of hyper realistic mental breakdown.”

“Glad to know I have that effect on people.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.” Phil gently nudges his shoulder with a smile. “I wasn’t sure we’d actually manage to get to you, if I’m honest. I knew I wanted to find you and I never let myself think any different, but so much happened along the way I wasn’t always sure I would. I mean, there was a moment an angry mob of vampires chased us and another where I nearly got my hand bitten off by a lion.”

“Excuse me?” Dan raises his eyebrows and pauses.

“Er-long story. I’ll tell you later.”

“Yeah, I think we both have our share of long stories to tell each other later. And I’m assuming we’ll tell them in between discussions about moving and shopping for black porcelain toilets.” Dan gives him a meaningful sideways glance. “Or was that part just pandering?”

“Hey, I totally don’t pander. Everything I say is genuine and heartfelt. If anything I’ll buy you a gift I secretly like and borrow it later.”

“You mean keep it.”

“No, I mean borrow it. For an extended period of time.”

“Wow. Forget linguistics,” Dan says. “ _You_ should have been the one to study law. You’ve already got the philosophy behind contra proferentem down pat.”

Phil snorts laughter. “Contra what? Is that a Harry Potter spell?”

As Dan answers with another exaggerated roll of his eyes, it occurs to Phil their little back and forth is just a clever ruse by Dan to keep him from focusing on the dense screen of smoke and reeling heat simmering around them. It’s a conversation neither of them is truly emotionally invested in save as a way of filling the tense gravity of the moment with companionable noise, but Phil doesn’t mind, especially not when it’s helping. Otherwise he thinks he’d be frozen in place again, unable to move at all without Dan dragging him along. He’s certain they’ll make it now. They’re making steady progress and the entrance to the passage is now only a few feet away. Susan urges them on with an enthusiastic beckoning wave as Cavall barks, his tail wagging just as enthusiastically behind him. Safety lies just past the shadows of the narrow corridor. As soon as they sprinted through the halls back down the stairs to the first floor and out, this entire experience would become nothing more than a troubling memory.

Phil’s once again imagines it vividly in his head, willing the uncanny power of visual manifestation to pull through for them now as it had before, and that’s when the giant chandelier above their heads gives way.

The spreading canopy of flames eats through the mural, producing a jagged crack that traces a path directly to the round ceiling medallion enclosing the chandelier’s chained anchor. A loud sound like the snapping strike of a whiplash makes them both look up and they watch with identical expression of dismay as a portion of the ceiling sags and then breaks off in a huge chunk taking both the plaster medallion and the chandelier along with it.

 It plummets through the air like a falling star, reflecting light in crazy strobes off the many faceted teardrops of swaying glass and diamonds. Phil knows they won’t be able to make it to the corridor in time, not even if Dan carried him over his shoulder and sprinted with all the force of his preternatural ability. Just before it slams into the floor Dan spins around and clutches Phil in a powerful bear hug and says, “Just look at me alright! Hold onto me and don’t let go!”

Phil has no time to answer, wouldn’t have been able to find anything to say even if he had. The massive bulk of the chandelier careens into the boards with the force of a detonated grenade and instantly, the floor splits open in an apocalyptic crater spewing projectiles of splinters and glass everywhere. A sparkling shard zings by Phil’s brow, drawing a line of heat in his skin as it narrowly misses embedding itself above his eye, but he doesn’t notice. The floor under his feet drops out and gravity yanks him down with it. Phil’s hands reflexively claw at Dan’s shoulders and they’re falling down, further and further down, past Susan and George’s horrified faces, past the ragged borders of the broken floorboards, on into the flames beneath their dangling feet in a heart stopping blur of searing heat and orange light. Panic magnifies the sensory details of the world around him with bizarre clarity. He can hear someone still playing the piano he’d heard earlier in the same frenzied arpeggio, but the artful sound of it has disintegrated to a jangling dissonance of keys struck at a mad pace to provide the perfect score for their equally mad descent to the burning floor hurtling up to meet them.

The chandelier however continues its path of destruction and punches another craterous hole through the weakened floorboards here too, before he and Dan can slam into it. And they’re falling down further still, further and further down, with a company of burning wreckage and the chaotic chime of the chandelier around them, on into the first floor. Heat singes at his hair and his face and he hears the rush of the wind in his ears and the fading tune of a piano being played with breakneck fury to match the heated force of the blaze, he sees the great holes in the ceiling left behind in their wake and the fiery ring of flames bordering each one. Then Dan twists them around in the air in a violent rush so they’re lying down in a perfectly horizontal position with Dan’s back facing the ground. The motion displaces Phil’s sense of direction and sends his head spinning. His senses lose their panic stricken clarity and everything becomes a kaleidoscopic confusion of light and sound instead. Even Dan’s face in front of him, pressed as they are forehead to forehead by the savage downward pull of gravity as they gather momentum, is an indistinct blur. Over Dan’s shoulder however Phil suddenly sees a large square of blue light zooming up towards them. Whatever it is, he realizes they’re going to collide with it and fear has numbed him so completely the knowledge of their impending impact doesn’t manage to inspire any greater emotion than detached indifference.

A great crescendo of shattering glass rings out as the remains of the chandelier bursts apart on hitting the floor, followed by the more resonant shatter of something else made of glass breaking along with it. Dan shouts in his ear, something incomprehensible quickly lost to the ringing echoes of exploding debris and roaring flames. Then the blue light eclipses everything else as it surges up to engulf them both. Dan slams into it first, bearing the brunt of the collision with his back and Phil can feel his body quake and seize with the shock of it. Then the light surrounds him too, deafening Phil at once; filling his eyes and nose to steal his breath and blind him. It’s cold, so incredibly cold and heavy. It’s his only real coherent thought. Dan’s tightly clenched grip around his back slackens and lets go. They drift apart, the light bearing them gently away from one another and when Phil reaches over to grab Dan’s listlessly floating hand he’s mildly surprised at how difficult it is to move; how much more difficult it is to think past the tremendous weight filling his head.

He’s aware he’s still falling into the suffocating blanket of blue light, but it’s ponderously slow, almost hypnotic and unreal like a dream. The weight in his head doubles, makes his exhaustion into an imperative to sleep he can’t ignore. His chest hitches for breath and the cold light immediately swirls through his nose and down his open mouth to further expand his lungs with terrible, dense pressure. He’s suffocating now. He can’t breathe and he would struggle to try, but he’s so tired…just so tired. He sees the silhouette of Dan’s body floating down beside him through the light, he sees the glint of flames, sees the silhouettes of other shapes he can’t identify gliding in calm swoops above his head like strange birds. Then he closes his eyes, succumbs to the oppressive weight in his head and in his lungs, and sees nothing else at all.

 

 ❧

 

It’s all very blue, Dan thinks, when blue meant being caught between conflicting shades of light and shadows, suspended in air as dense as glue; when blue was less like a color and more like a mood that meant disorienting confusion and distinct alarm. He can’t remember what he was doing. There’s a stifling silence in his ears and his back is rigid with pain. What had he been doing? Where was he? Everything is steeped in lovely refracting shades of turquoise and sapphire like a Caribbean sky. The kind overlooking a paradisiacal island destination where he expected to roam across the warm sand of a white beach and find Phil somewhere camped out on a towel underneath the sun dappled fronds of a palm tree. It’s that kind of inviting, vacation sort of ‘blue,’ a dreaming interlude where the world and all its troubles were briefly nullified, turned to something inoffensive and unobtrusive until he got on the plane back home. For all its beauty and implied tranquility however, he gets no sense of calm from where he is. He can’t figure out why though. He was meant to be doing something, leaving somewhere- wasn’t he? Electric tingles of pain course up and down his back and the muffled quiet filling his ears somehow makes it worse. It’s so cold and there’s a buoyant pressure enveloping his body, leaving him floating along without support like being inside of a snowglobe or a phone case filled with blue goo, the kind usually featured in twenty minute news reports about the dangers of severe chemical burns.

 _Well, I don’t feel like I’m boiling away in a vat of acid so there’s good news_ , he thinks dazedly. _It’s not really like being inside a phone case at all though. More like….floating….in water._

A memory pings in his subconscious rising fast to the fore of his waking thoughts with the brutal force of an epiphany.

 _The same force with which the chandelier fell_ , he thinks, eyes wide and aware. _The chandelier in the room we were meant to escape from before the floor caved in; before we fell together through the second floor until we landed here…in the water…in the aquarium._

It’s all suddenly terribly clear. Eris. Teague. The cracking floorboards. The falling chandelier. Grabbing Phil close as they’d dropped into the burning chasm which had opened up beneath them. The sudden dive into the cold chill of the floor insetted aquarium which had unexpectedly broken their fall.  
The memories of the last few hours flood back into his head and he realizes the idyllic blue glow surrounding him is nothing more than the aquarium’s atmospheric lights illuminating his descent as he falls further down to the silted gravel lining the deep bottomed floor of the tank below. He turns his head to look up and with dismay, notes how far off above his head the rippling surface of the water seems to be. Framing the borders of the aquarium’s edge he can see nothing else but angry orange-red light churning away in towering flames. He guesses he should thank Eris for the Court’s penchant of collecting ‘overpriced wank.’ Without it they’d never have found a brief sanctuary here from the inferno at the very last minute of impact when the chandelier had shattered the reinforced glass. He remembers twisting around to shield Phil from the eventual crash and he remembers thinking they were either going to hit the water or go off course to break their bones on the marble tiled floor of the lounge where it would take at least thirty of the same chandeliers falling at the same time to break the floor before they hit it. They’d thankfully lucked out with option number one and survived, albeit with the consequence of his back now feeling as if it had been bludgeoned with ten steel bats at once from the devastating blow of hitting the water at such a high rate of speed, but they still hadn’t escaped the fire and if they didn’t move, when the explosion Teague had warned them about came to pass, it wouldn’t matter if they’d found safety here in the frigid chill of the water around them when everything else went to hell. If the tank’s walls itself were reinforced as Dan suspected they might be, he supposes he could swim to the bottom and find a way to stay there until it all blew over, literally. He didn’t need to breathe after all so perhaps it wasn’t such a ridiculous idea to drape himself along the gravel like an absurd catfish, but even if he had the nerve to try he knows Phil wouldn’t be able to stay there with him.

_Phil. Oh god, where is he??_

That next realization hits home with more pertinent urgency. He’d briefly lost consciousness after the collision. Quickly sifting through his memories, he can only recall letting Phil go and watching him float off into the blue murk, hair gently streaming around his face, his hands limp and his eyes closed. He’d yelled in Phil’s ear about holding his breath shortly before impact, but he wasn’t sure if Phil had been able to hear it over the chaos of everything else shattering and falling apart around them. If he was unconscious, if he went any longer without help to guide him back to the water’s surface for air, he would drown.

Dan quickly turns over on his side to look for him, trailing streams of bubbles through his wading fingers, and is immediately greeted by the long tubular shadow of a shark as it swims into view with its squat nose headed straight for him.

A spurt of bubbles escapes his mouth as he lets out a reflexive exclamation of, “ _shit_ ,” and frantically treads water to get out of the way. The shark, the same sleek brown nurse shark he remembers seeing before, doesn’t seem to care one dot about the flailing person in its path. It lightly bumps his fingers with its right pectoral fin, but continues gliding by in a slow graceful arc without turning course, oblivious to both him and the destruction going on around it. Dan turns his head to follow its path and over the swaying flick of its receding tail he spots Phil floating in the water only a few feet away. True fear sets in when Dan notices his eyes are still closed and his mouth is slightly open to let out a tiny trickle of fizz- the last vestiges of air in his lungs slowly escaping as he continues to sink to the bottom, pulled along by the sodden weight of his clothes and trainers.

 Dan grits his teeth and propels himself through the water, kicking his feet in powerful strokes to get to him. A school of bright yellow fish startles at his sudden movements and quickly darts out of his path. Another lone fish, one that looks strangely like a neon blue feebas, lingers around the gently waving strands of Phil’s hair, curiously nosing it as if the fish thought it might be algae or a new type of coral it might be able to find food in. It too panics when Dan draws near and flits off into the lilting bands of light at the other end of the aquarium. He reaches for Phil’s gently bobbing left hand and grabs hold, pulling Phil over to him through the water. It’s unsettling how it feels like handling a lifeless body. He’s so cold, so light and still. The small trail of fizz from his open mouth has stopped and Dan doesn’t want to think about if that meant his lungs had emptied completely of all the air left in them. Instead he steels his mind against concentrating on anything else except kicking up towards the surface of the water and the promise of air beyond, despite the roiling blaze waiting for him when he gets there.

He rockets upwards, willing his legs to kick as fast as they could while propelling himself further with his one free hand, the other wrapped securely around Phil’s waist. The angry light of the fire draws near. Now, instead of blue, the water near the top of the tank is almost completely suffused in an orange glow. The dense weight of the water fills his ears with stifling silence for a moment longer, but then with another powerful kick and a downward sweep of his arm his face breaks the surface and he emerges back out into a deafening backdrop of roaring flames. The contrast is an instant shock to the system. From muffled quiet to furious chaos. Water streams down his brow into his eyes, but he shakes his head to clear it away and wades towards the edge of the tank in front of him, making a beeline to a spot on the marble floor not covered in a burning wreckage of wooden floorboards and the twisted remains of the chandelier. Phil drags along with him, safely held upright in Dan’s grip, but his head lolls back on his neck in a way that’s uncomfortable to look at. At any other time Dan would think he looked stone drunk, but here, unconscious, with his skin gone a sallow tint that seems to be turning blue at the edges, he just looks half dead. He hasn’t taken a breath since they’d emerged from the water and when Dan tries to listen for a heartbeat over the sound of frantic splashing as he hurries to deposit Phil on the floor, he hears nothing but silence.

“No, no, no. Come on, Phil. This is bullshit and you know it,” Dan mutters.

He clambers out of the water with Phil in his arms and kneels at once to lay Phil down and listen for the subtle heave of his chest to indicate he was breathing, but his chest remains motionless. Dan places his ear next to Phil’s ribcage and his fingers claw at the marble tiles under his palms as he listens for a heartbeat. He draws four tiny scratches in the hard porous surface before he finally hears it, a dull, slow rhythm of a pulse like a watch with minimal battery life left, shuddering and jolting its way to silence. He needs to get Phil back to breathing. Now. Or his heart would similarly wind its way down to its last pulse forever. For all that he criticized Phil for freaking out, he finds himself in the same harried state now, unsure of how to properly administer first aid although he knows CPR. He understands the procedure behind resuscitative breaths, could picture the diagrams and instructions clearly in his mind, but in the moment, surrounded by the heat of the flames quickly drying the protective pall of water covering his skin and clothes to burn him alive, he draws a complete blank. Instead, the first thing that pops into his head is the panicked idea of lifting Phil up by his ankles and shaking the water out of his lungs until it streamed out of his ears. it’s the same absurd rationale behind his father’s logic all those many years ago which shouldn’t have worked at all back then and definitely wouldn’t stand a chance of working here now, but in the absence of better ideas it seems more tempting than it should be to try.

“ _You’d turn back the very hands of time to save him wouldn’t you?_ ”

Eris’ question from the car comes back to him and without hesitation Dan thinks, _yes, absolutely, give me a time machine, a glorified microwave of a flux capacitor-I don’t care. I’d drag us both into it and try to make this okay. God, Phil. Please. Please be okay._

If Teague were here, Dan is certain he’d deliver a stern admonishment for Dan to, “stop messing about and get on with it already.” He already knows what he has to do whether his panicked brain wants to admit it or not. His fight with George had proven that well enough as had his confrontation with the Court. He already had everything he needed- he was already prepared, already strong and committed. He has a good idea of where to begin, all he needed to do was to stop agonizing over his decisions and implement them before he convinced himself it was a bad idea to try. He had knowledge tempered by wisdom and compassion; he had strength and conviction, and he had the trust of the one person who had been given enough reasons tonight not to trust him at all; the same person whose very life was now relying on him to follow through with his confidence and skills.

 _I can do this_ , Dan thinks. _Don’t think about it so much. Just act._

He places two hands on Phil’s chest after doing a mental check of proper placement. He knows CPR, but he’s never actually done compressions before. If he performed the wrong application of the technique it would be just as good as if he didn’t know it at all. He also needed to keep his strength in check. If he used too much strength he was liable to break Phil’s ribs in one fatal downward press of his hands. Too little strength of course and the compressions would count for nothing. He needs to find a proper middle ground in one go without the benefit of trial and error to help him along. Water drops into his eyes again and he impatiently flicks it away with a curt shake of his head.

_Right. Here goes nothing…._

He restrains the reckless power in his arms, mentally subdues it to a level of mild tension and then bears down in quick even bursts of compressions on Phil’s sternum. He counts down the seconds to a full minute, pumping the heel of his hand in an even steady pace. One minute seems like three hours and through it all there’s no visible difference in the sluggish plod of Phil’s heart or the motionless surface of his chest. He thinks he’s done the allotted sixty compressions. Or was it supposed to be a hundred? He can’t remember which it is, but he stops and quickly checks Phil’s open mouth for any sign of a labored breath no matter how small.

Nothing.

He quickly tries again. This time supplementing the compressions with rescue breaths by placing his mouth over Phil’s to deposit much needed air down his throat. It’s no effort at all to inhale oxygen he no longer needs and give it to Phil instead, but although Phil’s chest expands with each borrowed breath, when Dan pulls away it falls back to the same inert position without following through with an inhale of its own. He tries the compressions again, a quick spurt of one hundred instead of sixty just to be safe and when he pulls away the response is the same.

Nothing.

Phil continues to lie there, waxen and vaguely blue, unmoving and unresponsive. His heart is still beating but the seconds between each pulse is fast growing into longer and longer intervals each time. Panic and desperation mingle to a visceral point of terror and Dan slams his fist into the floor, instantly cracking the tiles under his knuckles with a strangled cry of, “ _please!_ ” He has no idea whom he’s pleading with- whether with Phil, a semblance of God, the universe or merely himself. He’s never felt so ineffectual, so utterly and horrifically helpless. Watching Teague fall had been bad enough, but there had been no time to do anything to stop it, here however, where he had the opportunity to actually do something, he’s forced to watch every effort fail.

_Perhaps not as helpless as you think. There’s one thing you could do, one thing you could try when all else fails._

His mind provides a mental picture of himself leaning over Phil and pressing a wrist to his mouth to drip blood down his throat instead of air. What was that oft quoted phrase? Drink from me and live forever? If he tried to turn Phil while his heart was still beating and he lingered on the brink between life and death with enough spark of human life left for him to swallow Dan’s blood, then perhaps he could save Phil after all. But if Yilmaz’s method was universally correct, then he imagines he’d have to drain Phil first, take his human blood and return it back mixed with his own. That was a problem in itself. With Phil’s heart already so weak, Dan is afraid it wouldn’t be able to withstand the stress of acute blood loss. And then to attempt it here, in the middle of so much destruction, when the house stood ready to fall at any minute and when he wasn’t sure if his unconventional blood transfusion would work just as the compressions hadn’t seemed to work, isn’t the ideal way Dan had ever thought of going about this. Even if he decided he didn’t care and wanted to try anyway, although CPR was a technique he had a good clue about how to administer, transforming someone into an immortal creature wasn’t exactly something the Red Cross had ever included in their online manuals. He might end up doing more harm than good, especially when Phil had already told him he wasn’t yet prepared to take such a crucial step. Neither of them was, not really, but considering the severity of the situation, Dan wonders if some last minute allowances couldn’t be made. He could either live with Phil’s deep-seated resentment over being forced into a detrimental life change he never had time to prepare for or, once the plodding heartbeat finally stopped, he would have to learn how to live without Phil at all. In a coin toss of choices, neither is favorable.

Phil’s throat is bared in the perfect position for a bite. Just a quick slide of his fangs through the skin, a long deep draught of warm blood, a bite at his own wrist to press it quickly to Phil’s lips and Phil would awaken transformed, brimming with new vitality and life no one would ever be able to steal from him again.

 _No_. Dan shakes his head and pushes the image from his mind _. I’m not turning him here. Not in this place, not like this, not without him telling me so._

His subconscious instantly supplies a counterargument: _What good is taking the moral high ground if he ends up dead? It’s all well and good to consider his wishes, but if things go bad, if he doesn’t manage to breathe on his own after all this…_

Dan doesn’t allow the thought to finish. He shoves it away back to the depths of his subconscious along with all his other uncomfortable thoughts. He’d handle things accordingly when and if they arrived at that point. Phil had made it this far- had survived innumerable, impossible trials, defeated Eris’ glamour, escaped vampire mobs and a snapping lion’s jaws, according to his own abridged testimony, and he’d accomplished all this and more on his own merit as a human. Why then shouldn’t he survive this trial as a human too? He was strong. He always had been. Even now, his heart continued to stubbornly thud despite enduring a terrifying fall and water in his lungs. Although unconscious, Phil’s resolve to live was still as tenacious and resilient as it had always been. To deny that seemed to poorly underestimate him.

 _He’s always given me the benefit of the doubt,_ Dan thinks. _Now it’s my turn to return the favor._

Phil had survived this experience as a human and he would walk away from here a human as well. He was strong. He could make it. Dan is convinced of this and he allows this affirmation to carry him through each new compression of Phil’s chest. He’s focused on the pumping motion of his hands, studiously counting to one hundred and he hasn’t made it as far as twenty yet when suddenly, Phil’s eyes snap open wide, mouth gaping, chest heaving and he jerks onto this side with a shuddering, retching cough. A stream of water immediately runs out of his mouth and it hasn’t stopped when his body spasms with another cough to expel yet more water. When the stream finally abates to a rill of drool, Phil collapses onto his back and takes in an unsteady but huge breath of air. Dan can hear his heart cantering along in wild time to the new stores of adrenaline surging through his veins and Dan thinks if they weren’t currently stuck in a burning house he’d likely also collapse onto his back from the sheer force of his relief and stay that way for an hour. Phil’s chest rises and falls and Dan risks a second longer to enjoy the sight of it before asking, “are you alright?”

Of course he wasn’t, Dan thinks. How could either of them be alright in a situation like this? But he needs to hear Phil speak, to have the final reassurance of his presence as if he needed to convince himself he hadn’t just self-inflicted a realistic illusion of Phil’s recovery like a glamour in reverse.

Phil turns his head slowly to look at him, still bleary eyed and pale, but without the bluish tinge of suffocation and impending death in his face for which Dan is fiercely glad. He smiles or tries to, and then winces as another wet cough produces a trickle of water he spits onto the floor. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand with a faint look of disgust, but the wan smile settles back onto his lips as he looks at Dan again.

“I think so. I don’t know,” he says. “Don’t really feel so good...”

His voice is faint and he doesn’t look entirely aware of himself. He inclines forward to a sitting position on the floor, bracing himself on the back of his arms to lift up and even this slight motion seems too much for him. His upper body sways and Dan knows he won’t be able to make it out of here on his own two feet without collapsing again, not with the fire churning the air into a thick miasma of ash making it difficult for any human to walk around in, let alone breathe properly. If the fall and the water hadn’t killed him, smoke inhalation is next on the list to try.

“What happened to the blue light?” Phil looks around with a muzzy expression.

“Blue light?” Dan frowns, then glances behind him at the shifting waters of the aquarium next to his foot and realizes what he means. “There was no blue light. We fell into a huge fish tank in the floor.”

“Oh….so the light was really water and the birds were really fish.” Phil giggles softly to himself as if this were a private inside joke he found incredibly amusing. Then he coughs and all good humor flees his face and he’s back to looking drawn and weary.

“I’ll get us out of here, its fine,” Dan says quickly. “Just grab onto me like before.”

Phil does so without further comment, clamping his hands over Dan’s shoulders as Dan straightens up and helps him to stand. His wet clothes cling in sodden layers to his body and his fingers are still too cold and frail than was reassuring. If they didn’t hurry, pneumonia would race the fire to the finish line to see which one would finish Phil off first.

 _Positive thoughts like that are what get you far in life_ , Dan thinks wryly.

“I want to go home,” Phil says without warning and the remark though straightforward carries a deeper inflection of meaning by the solemn stare he gives Dan. If the flat was destroyed, it implies, if there was no flat at all to go back to, if we had nothing but boxes and tarp and our own dreams to sustain us, I’d still want to go home. Anywhere far from here, with you, is home.

Dan’s throat suddenly feels tight and suffocating, but he returns Phil’s stare with the same profound weight of meaning and gives a curt, silent nod in agreement.

Phil returns the nod and manages to stay upright for a full minute before he totters forward and leans the full weight of his body against Dan’s chest.

“Okay. Okay then.’ Phil nods again, this time as if answering a question in his own head and before Dan can ask what’s wrong or what he means, he loses consciousness with a soft sigh. His hands loosen and his legs fold up underneath him, but before he can slide back to the floor in a heap, Dan grabs him under his arms and pulls him upright again. His heart still beats in a brisk, lively trot in his chest and he continues to breathe evenly on his own, but his mind, clearly having endured enough stress for the night, has decided to check out until further notice.

“Come on, Phil. Time to go,” Dan mutters and hauls Phil up to hang in a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. “I’m getting you out of this place. I’m getting us both out. So just hang on.”

He braces himself and turns to survey the burning devastation of the room around them. The previously lush lounge with its expensive statues and fineries has turned into an incinerator. The metal frame of the large chandelier which had fallen three floors with them is overturned in the middle of the room, surrounded by a shattered mosaic of broken glass. Chunks of the ceiling and splintered floorboards from above litter the floor as well, every inch of it on fire. The heat bakes his clothes and as the remaining layer of water begins to dry up, his skin begins to prickle with the warning of an oncoming burn that would soon charbroil him to overcooked if he didn’t find a way out and fast. He spots the entryway of the lounge across the room and begins to trace a path towards it, carefully picking his way around burning piles of furniture and broken statues made by distinguished sculptors whose names he can’t remember and doesn’t care to. A glass frame over a picture on the wall explodes outwards from the heat and he ducks a small shard as it zings by his head. After enough practice with Makhai, it’s become second nature.

 He makes it to the entrance easily enough after that, but finds the hallway beyond thick with billowing clouds of black smoke, making it difficult to see down one end or the other. He ducks low to the ground to keep Phil’s face away from the smoke for as long as possible until he could figure out which way to go, though he has no idea of where to start. Picking the wrong direction meant he’d only lose himself further in the labyrinthine corridors of the house, choking Phil with the smoke the longer they stayed in here or trapping themselves by falling debris to burn up in the fire long before the house exploded. What he wouldn’t give for a mini-map appearing in his periphery like the HUD on a videogame. At least then he’d have a better idea of where he was in relation to the exit. Right now he’s set to meander aimlessly without anyone around to redirect him. He briefly thinks of George then, his unlikely savior from before, and hopes he and the girl who’d been with him had managed to get out safely. The chances of running into another unlikely source of help here in the middle of so much destruction seems nil however and without time left to agonize over it further, he throws caution to the wind, chooses the path to his right and heads off in that direction in an awkward slouching jog down the hall.

Over the sounds of the fire and rumbling crashes of things falling apart, he can make out the noise of piano keys playing a furious concerto in fortissimo. ( _Rachmaninov, number two, C minor, Op.18_ , the thought drifts to him lazily and melts to the back of his mind, eclipsed by the greater question of who on earth could be playing a piano in the middle of a full blown firestorm of destruction, like Nero playing a fiddle while Rome burned to the ground?) The piano and the fire mix in a thunderous crescendo as he trudges on through the smoke, blindly hoping for fool’s luck to tip its hat his way again. The hanging portraits of aristocrats marking his progress on the walls on either side of him have become horrific parodies of their former selves. Their eyes no longer seem to follow him so much as glare out at him accusingly. Their pupils mix and run together with the paint melting down their burning canvases to drip in murky splats of varnish and oil onto the floor. He glimpses Eris’ portrait next to these destroyed figures and her blackened teeth and waterfall of equally black hair have swirled together to make a distorted void of her face, turning her into a grotesque nightmare of Nicola Samori proportions, but one considerably more horrific and mad that seems to howl at him in rage as he passes by.

 _I guess talk wasn’t the only thing I was good for in the end, was I?_ He directs this thought at her charred painting and in doing so bids his last farewell of Eris and her destroyed compatriots.

  _Good riddance_ , he thinks as he turns his attention back to the smoke clogged corridor in front of him. _Good riddance to all of it._

The piano trills on in resonant chords hit with such vehemence and speed Dan wonders how the pianist hasn’t managed to smash the keys with every blow. Over the hectic sound of it however, he hears something else- a more sedate and familiar jingling chime like dog tags.

 “Cavall?” He calls ahead, still not sure if his assumption was correct, but in response the mincing _click click click_ of a dog’s nails tapping across the floor in a neat sprint at the sound of his voice rings out in the hall and before long, Cavall’s white furred head emerges below the column of smoke in front of him.

“It is you!” He crouches down and Cavall races over at once, panting through his grinning mouth. His fur is dingy from the swirling motes of ash in the air and the tip of his right ear looks as if it had come too close to a burning ember, but Cavall seems in good spirits regardless. He places his two front paws on Dan’s knees and cranes his muzzle up to lick Dan’s nose, his tail starting up its usual off-kilter metronomic sway. Dan tolerates this slobbery canine greeting, welcoming the coolness of it through the humid mask of dirt and sweat on his cheeks, before finally moving his face away, not without some reluctance.

“If you were able to get out, I guess the others did as well, huh?”

Cavall tilts his head to the left. Message received but not entirely understood apparently.

“Or…are you stuck with us here too?” Dan’s heart sinks at the idea. What if George and the girl he’d seen enter the room with Phil hadn’t made it out after all? What if they too had encountered a similar fate as Teague and in the absence of company or a way out, Cavall had meandered through the halls in forlorn desperation, looking for a familiar face, until he’d come upon Dan?

 _Maybe we were too late?_ Dan stares at the floor in reflective horror. _Maybe this is it? If there’s no way out….if we’re trapped in here…_

His mind starts up a successive avalanche effect of bad thoughts, each one motivating the other in turn to produce bleaker and bleaker scenarios in which he and Phil remained here in this choked off hallway to suffer the same fate as the ravaged portraits he’d left behind. He doesn’t want to think that way, but the idea sounds too plausible for him to deny. Cavall tilts his head the other way as he studies Dan’s tormented expression and then, with a quiet ‘whuff’ sound low in his throat as if he were sighing in forbearance at Dan’s internal crisis, he gets up and moves away back down the hall. He pauses halfway and sits down, looking back over his shoulder as if to ask, ‘well? Are you coming or not?’

Dan stares at him and wonders. Cavall has that knowing glint in his eyes again, an unsettling human type of awareness Dan finds difficult to pass off as coincidence. It could have been Phil looking at him, asking if he were done ruminating on their mutual destruction and if so, would he like to be getting on about the business of surviving instead?

“Alright,” Dan says and straightens up again, shifting Phil’s weight on his shoulder. “I’ll follow you, but if you end up leading me to a bag of crisps, I’m making you into a hat.”

Cavall barks in apparent agreement to the terms and instantly breaks out into a loping trot down the hall. He keeps to a stringent path in front of Dan, never hesitating at intersecting corridors to sniff and look around. Instead he continues on without stopping, banking left and right where he deems appropriate, paying no mind at all to the swirling pyre consuming every room and hallway they pass. Now, in the procession of locked doors on either side of him, Dan can’t sense any other aroma sifting from their inaccessible rooms other than smoke and fire. He passes the corridor of amphorae where he and George had taken cover from the milling crowd of partygoers and he glances over to see each ancient vase littering the ground with ceramic shards. Many are charred beyond recognition, with others in line to follow suit. On another quick turn to his left he sees the curtain obscuring the alcove where he’d taken refuge to call Phil on the antiquated rotary phone he’d accidentally crushed in hand when George had found him. Both the alcove and the curtain are drowned in flames. He passes the same promenade of chandeliers, all now resembling hanging bonfires from the ceiling. A few more dangle precariously by their last mooring, ready to fall with the slightest provocation. Every opulent artifact testifying to the Court’s legacy of riches and power, all the grand demonstrations of artistic design and style that Eris had made a point to show him before, now lies in shambles, scorched beyond recognition or repair. Dan wonders if the Court had ever thought they’d meet their end by the hands of two strangers, a new blood and a human, each hailing from opposite ends of the country, each of them unlikely opponents with unlikelier careers, united together with the singular purpose of resisting the indomitable reign of creatures who had probably thought their greatest threat was each other. He remembers Aeacus’ words denouncing him as weak and insufficient: “You can defy us, but will never win against us. We are many and you, boy, are only one person. One new blood with nothing to rely on, but the grace of our mercy.”

 _Guess I was more than enough after all, because here I am and where are you,_ Dan thinks with a vicious twinge of satisfaction. _Even without being the spitting image of power that Makhai revered, even without having the influence, malice and savagery you all thought I should embrace, I defeated you. We both did._

He and Phil had defied the odds, accomplished the impossible, as had always been their habit from the start, but even while Dan notes the evidence of his triumph a part of him still can’t believe it.

 _We did this_ , he thinks as he races past more rooms filled with devastation. _We made this happen, maybe not all of it on purpose, maybe more on accident than by design, but we still had a hand in this. We stopped them. We endured, we survived, through it all we rose above and managed to make it here, to this point in time. Somehow…we made it._

It’s incredible to him. They had changed things in irrevocable ways and he suspects they would have to face the consequences of whatever might happen next as a result. In destroying the Night Court, they’d in turn altered the fabric of vampire rule in London, a change that would likely sweep through the Courts of other cities in other countries the world over. The news of what happened here wouldn’t remain idle in a vacuum for long. Dan has no idea what to expect once word spread, but he puts it out of mind. For now, his greatest concern isn’t basking in their victory or worrying over repercussions which hadn’t yet come to pass. He’s focused only on following Cavall through the carnage around them before the house exploded with them still inside. They make another darting turn into a wide hall and abruptly a new refreshing tide of scents comes to him over the corrosive smell of fire. It’s lighter, cooler and when he pulls it down through his nose it tickles the back of his throat with a brisk sweetness like mint. An errant breeze follows right behind it, ruffling his hair and he sprints towards it, overtaking Cavall in his haste when he realizes the scent is that of rain and the breeze it rides in on comes from an open door leading outside; leading to freedom.

 He sees it then, an enormous entryway with two double doors flung wide to the evening air beyond and Dan doubles his pace to reach it. Cavall tries to keep up but he’s no match for a vampire’s speed, not even that of a new blood and he quickly falls behind. A hurt, high-pitched yip suddenly makes Dan whip his head around to see Cavall now limping at an awkward lurching jog, his right front paw raised over a sharp piece of glass he’d apparently stepped on. The soft raised pads underneath are dotted with flecks of blood and on seeing it Dan immediately skids to a stop and turns around to race back over to him. At the same time a chandelier at the other end of the hall lets go from the ceiling and plummets to the floor with a booming crash, making Cavall whine uneasily.

“It’s fine, I’m here. I’ll get you out too,” Dan murmurs. He scoops up Cavall in his other free hand and supports him like a draped stole over his arm, all four paws dangling freely. The dog seems to have no issue with this new arrangement and contentedly falls back to his usual panting grin as Dan turns once more towards the doors and the promise of safety outside. It’s then, in the space of seconds between his pivoting turn, that the fire steadily making quick work of the basement beneath him finally winds its way into the liquor storage. It trickles in at first with a hesitant lick of heat and embers before catching the side of an aged whiskey barrel. The flames devour the oak slats with relish, heating the contents inside to a froth of combustible flames which quickly works as a Molotov cocktail to burn the rest of the barrels in quick succession; setting off a devastating chain of events through every bottle, barrel and container stored in the expansive room. The fire pours in to boil the vapor of burning alcohol into a flash point of ignition and Dan is less than five yards away from the doors when the basement finally explodes.

He hears it first. A great rumbling noise like the trembling passage of an underground train. Then he feels it beneath him, a rocking swaying tremor in the floor that grows and swells to a cataclysmic earthquake shuddering the walls around him in convulsive blurs. He zeroes in on the square entryway of light and wind in front of him as the house begins to shake itself to hell and he plunges towards it even while he feels the floor beneath his feet bulge in a mountainous ripple, pushed upwards by the force of the explosion tearing its way out of the basement. He doesn’t want to look behind him, but he doesn’t need to. He can feel the heat of the fireball at his back, surging out from its center in a blast zone of fire and destruction to swallow him whole. He’s less than a few feet away when he leaps forward and the pressured blast of the explosion shoves him the rest of the way out the doors as the house erupts with a deafening roar. He wants to think he looks like an actor doing an impressive cinematic escape like every action movie where the lead was framed by a mushroom cloud of fire they’d somehow managed to evade in a graceful slow motion arc through the air; but there’s nothing slow motion or graceful about his leap. The heat of the blast wave swats him to the ground outside with painful, reckless force and the lawn hurtles up towards his face at lethal speed. Not keen on once more connecting face first with a hard object like he’d been subject to for the majority of the night, he twists around, instinctively diverting Phil and Cavall away from the approaching impact, and tumbles painfully onto his back with nothing but a rain drenched lawn instead of an aquarium this time to break his fall.

 Debris begins to rain down from the sky and he swiftly turns over to shield Phil and Cavall the best he can from the shards of blown out windows and wooden shrapnel thudding into the ground like detonated grenades around them. The explosion seems to last a lifetime. Every time one blast ebbs away, another answers from the depths of the house with rending tremors Dan can still feel resonating through the soil and grass under his body. He’s aware on a superficial level that the storm which had greeted his arrival to the house has died off, leaving only a fine drizzle of rain to pour over his head and shoulders instead of the furious downpour which had only hours before bombarded the house in a drumming riot of thunder and lightning. The only thunder to be heard now comes from the continued destruction behind him and his hand curls into the dip between Phil’s shoulder blades, holding him closer until it all stops. His forehead presses into the damp earth and he breathes in the accumulated scent of rain and the crisp mint of grass, once more quietly incredulous and overwhelmed that he was here, that they had made it.

He doesn’t know how long he might have stayed there unmoving, curled up on his knees with Phil and a small white dog bundled on either side of him, when a hand gently touches his shoulder and a voice calls his name.

“Dan? Oh thank god, you guys made it out in time after all.”

He cautions a glance up and sees the girl who had appeared with Phil and Teague from the hidden passage in the wall, the one who had addressed herself over the phone to him as their chauffeur. Her neon yellow-green rain mac has gone a muddy shade of grey and her hair, once plaited neatly in a coil around her head has come loose to hang in tangled drenched strands about her face. She looks relieved to see him however, overjoyed despite the scratches marring her face like tiny whiplashes and the splotches of dirt streaking her skin. Dan returns her relief, happy to see that she and George had escaped after all, but there’s a mark of sadness in her face as well, a lingering note of grief left over from Teague’s sudden departure and Dan empathizes with it more than he trusts himself to adequately express with words as Teague’s absence becomes an acutely bitter sensation here, grouped as they were outside the devastation of the house which had ultimately claimed him. The girl recognizes the answering condolence in his demeanor and bows her head slightly to signify that she understands, herself also lost for words to best express her loss. Death had no satisfying explanations and when it came to lay its mark over loved ones whose own contribution to the lives of those they’d touched was itself inexplicable and profound, there was nothing else to do except allow silence to fill in the gap they’d left behind, one where words could do no justice.

After a moment, the girl gestures at Phil and clears her throat to ask, “is he alright?”

Dan stills, listening for a heartbeat and the immediate sounds of life present in the comfortable rumble of Phil’s breath and the thudding regularity of his pulse work to ease the painful sting left by Teague’s passing.

“Yeah, he is. Or he will be. He lost consciousness before, but he’s strong. He’s just…been through a lot.”

“I think we all have,” the girl says in a quiet afterthought to herself. “I’m Susan by the way. And you’re Dan of course. Teague and Phil spoke to me about you.”

In any other instance he’d make a small joke about how her name was a running theme for him and Phil, how she had been named after video game characters and inanimate objects, but in finding himself too exhausted to think of how to string that thought together into anything resembling a coherent sentence, Dan doesn’t know how else to respond save to give her an affirming nod. With the both of them unsure of how to broach the silence with more appropriate topics in the wake of their conflicting emotions and overwhelming fatigue, Susan steps away and looks back towards the house with a severe, drawn expression. The sputtering light of the flames reflects in the raindrops falling from her hair like tiny embers as she mutters, “I don’t think I’ll ever forget what happened here tonight, but I really fucking want to.”

Dan rolls over, releasing Phil and Cavall to lean on his side and watch the spiraling tower of flames collapsing the great manor which had played host to an evening of impossible trials, conflicts and tragedies. Funny how it seemed like nothing now, just a gutted foundation of collapsing beams- a lot of hot air and failed grandstanding like so many bullies really were at their core. Through the fine drizzle of rain the house looks like a sad caricature of what it had once been. Like Susan, he also wants to forget what had happened here, but at the same time he wants to hold onto the memory of their accomplishments, to relish the satisfaction of having defeated the bleak expectations of their worst foes and critics, not the least of which had been their own. There was a lesson here, harsh and bittersweet as it was, and he didn’t want to forget it or cavalierly toss the memory aside as Lethe might have done. This was important. This was vital. As the house had once stood testament to a group’s uncontested and cruel reign, its subsequent destruction stood testament to the power of their resistance, to the crowning achievement of their success where he now no longer needed to constantly defend his position to survive. Alone and together, who they were at heart had been enough to surmount every difficulty the Court had thrown their way.

The flames arch high through the broken windows and collapsed roof, flaring up into a giant torch he’s sure can be seen for miles along the horizon. Even now he can hear the far off wailing drone of fire engines in the distance, followed, he supposes, by a legion of police vehicles meant to investigate the destruction and take witness testimonials.

 _What happened here? Oh nothing, officers. We blew up a house belonging to a powerful group of vampires, no big deal,_ Dan thinks. _Just making the Crown Prosecutor’s job easy for them, otherwise you’d have to sift through multiple counts of extortion, bribery, assault, murder and bad interior design. Oh? What’s that? What we did here is technically arson? That’s alright. You see, I’m not only a vampire, I’m also a YouTuber and once I make a video explaining what happened, it’ll clear everything right up. Because that always works out for the best, right?_

His internal sardonic conversation must show on his face because Susan looks down at him and asks, “what’s so funny?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing and everything. It’s all one big joke anyway, isn’t it?”

“Depends on who’s writing the punchline I suppose.”

The sound of footsteps through the sodden grass makes them to turn to look and see George slowly trudging his way over, one hand still clutching the healed over scar in his chest. His posture is pained and bowed over, like an elderly man afflicted with severe osteoporosis, but he raises a hand in easy greeting and Dan raises one back.

“Wasn’t sure if we’d ever meet again,” George says when he reaches them. “You both fell into the floor and I thought…” he trails off and leaves the obvious unsaid. “After Cavall lead us out here, he raced back inside and I wanted to hope that meant he knew you were both still alive.”

“He knew alright.” Dan smiles and scruffs the top of Cavall’s head who remains stretched out in the grass beside him, eyes closing in appreciation of the fingers now scratching the favored spot behind his left ear.

“Never thought I’d see anything like this happen.” George’s voice takes on a subdued note of reverence. “They’d held their position for centuries you understand, some of them for even longer than that. They were petty and malicious, but incredibly efficient when it came to defending their reign. I remember being told about coups and skirmishes, all planned meticulously in secret for months and years in advance, which ended up failing miserably. Then you two showed up and it all fell in one night.”

“Well, that’s what we do. Give us a tiny website and we’ll accidentally crush it like a clumsy giant. Give us a manor filled with ancient vampires and we’ll accidentally blow it up.”

George laughs. “So this is just a day in the life for the both of you.”

“Not really. Our series tends to focus on less life threatening excursions in the city, but imagine if we made a video like that?” Dan muses. “An entire vlog detailing our adventures in ending vampiric tyranny and dealing with the dangers of combustible liquids, complete with ‘domestic bants’ interspersed with moments of pure terror. Click subscribe to see more.”

 A discordant thunderclap of an explosion goes off inside the house again, a smaller blast this time, caused perhaps by the flames finding a pocket of unburnt whiskey barrels or a gas line which hadn’t yet succumbed to the fire. George watches it all with the same reverent smile, as if he were observing a beautiful natural phenomenon.

“I wanted it so badly. Everything they had, everything they stood for and now here I am overjoyed there’s nothing left,” he says. “I don’t think things will necessarily be easier for me after this though.” He looks at Dan and his reverence fades to a somber expression. “I don’t think things will necessarily be easier for you either. When things like this come to light, it’s harder to keep a low profile. Harder still to defend your existence against a world of strangers who all suddenly want to know more about the new blood who took down the Court, all of them ready to analyze your character and worth and see how it measures up.”

“So you’re saying not much difference from the norm then,” Dan says, dryly. “After all this though…maybe I don’t feel like I need to protect my personality with battle armor anymore. Like you told Eris, we still have our own lives, our own hearts and minds to do with whatever the hell we please without giving the best parts of ourselves and our experiences away if we don’t feel like it. I mean, everything we went through tonight was difficult enough and we survived. We made it. Whatever else comes after, I think we’re ready to meet it head on and handle it with the best of what we have-with the best of who we are, without hiding ourselves away. Because we already did the same here and we succeeded.”

George looks at him, silently taking in his words, then after another moment he nods appreciatively. “Maybe things might not be easier, but at least we have what we need to face whatever comes.”

They both understand there’s more to it than that; that having themselves and the presence of their loves one might not always seem like enough to weather the often brutal indifference of a universe where misery, tragedy and loss chased the hours of existence on into infinity without meaning or purpose or simple resolutions, but this new awareness of their own capabilities, the reinforced confidence they had in themselves and in each other, grants a better perspective to make it all seem worthwhile anyway. Nothing was easy. Life was a grab-bag of unprecedented events where sometimes it was easier to laugh when you wanted to cry and where sometimes there was no other way to respond except with silence, but Dan thinks whatever changes life would present in the months and years to come, he was ready to meet it all without shying away; without hiding the force of his convictions or character any longer. If who he was didn’t match the reflection others had made of him in their heads, then so be it. If his refusal to adhere to the paradigms others tried to enforce on him brought controversy as a result, then so be it as well. He had his own aspirations to follow, his own ideas of who he wanted to be and of how he wanted to live and he knew it was the same for Phil as well. With the open promise of eternity ahead and a night of horrors and revelations left behind him, Dan is inspired to make the best of every opportunity. As the cool breeze of the dissipating storm bears away the smell of smoke and the harsher memory of their struggles along with it, Dan is certain now. He has what he needs, he knows what he means to do and no Night Court would take that surety of self away from him, whether that Court came in the form of vampires or in the lurking menace of his darker subconscious thoughts.

 “If you think you can manage it, if Phil is able to be moved, we have to be going.” George speaks up again to gently interrupt his train of thought. “Soon there’ll be too many eyes, too many questions.” He points at a line of flashing blue and red lights now visible beyond the sprawling border of rowan trees encircling the property.

“Sure, but we can’t exactly walk back home like this or call an Uber,” Dan says, promptly imagining an Uber driver making a screeching 180 as soon as they saw the state of the passengers they were meant to pick up.

Susan waves the idea away with a smile. “We don’t need to. George said when the staff fled they left a lot of the service vehicles behind that belonged to the Court. He grabbed a set of keys on our way out, one of those fancy keyless remote entry fobs. We just click the button on the remote, see which car answers and we’re off. I’d have hotwired one if it really came down it, but this works out easier.” She shrugs. “There’s also the McLaren we came here in, but for one thing, there wouldn’t be enough room for all of us and for another, it’s stashed somewhere on the other end of a long nightmare tunnel I don’t know how to navigate around from topside. Not under these circumstances anyway.”

Dan stares at her. “Are you…sort of a spy or…?”

Susan laughs and some of the pained grief on her face momentarily lifts away. “No, I’m not James Bond. Just an ex-car thief who probably should have spent more time studying than nicking people’s property, but here we are. And although that reputation is far behind me, if I get interrogated by the ‘Old Bill’ then let’s say it won’t exactly do me any favors either.”

“None of us are safe here,” George says. “If it’s not the police, then it’s the dawn. Look.”

Dan glances up at the sky and through the falling drops of rain he sees the dark clouds are lightening up and moving away, rolling across at a slow northerly rate to bring the abated ferocity of the storm to the greater highlands and moors where it would either lose steam in the dry peat and heath covering the land or tumble its way out to sea and grow back to monstrous proportions over the Atlantic. Either way, it had clearly had its fill of London for good. Left behind in the storm’s leisurely passage is a membranous scrim of hazy clouds, thin and inconsequential compared to the deluge packed cumulonimbus clouds which had just departed. These are slowly passing out of the sky as well however, soon to expose a deep lush shade of purple, the royal heraldry of the creeping dawn, which would itself segue into bands of brilliant reds and golds with the onset of the morning sun. Without the storm to provide the heavy cover of rain soaked darkness and the evening sky currently bidding its farewells, the longer they stayed spread out on the lawn, the more they risked exposure either to police interrogation or a bone deep suntan Dan would never recover from. He looks over at Phil to gauge if he might be ready to move again and is surprised to see his eyes are open, raptly staring back at him in silence. The irises are startlingly blue here Dan notices, the color of spring morning skies, clear and placid. It’s no different from the usual shifting blend of blue green hues Phil’s eyes regularly adopted, but in the monotonous soup of grey clouds and orange fire around them, it’s a stunning and welcome contrast tempered further by the magnitude of their survival.

“Hello, you,” Dan murmurs. “How long have you been back on earth?”

“Just now actually.” Phil tries to move and manages a strained roll onto his back, closer to Dan. If the wet earth beneath him bothers him at all he doesn’t complain. He cranes his head up to look back at the manor steadily burning into an epic bonfire in the middle of the lawn and the fire’s hot glare somehow tints the blue of his eyes into a deep luxuriant shade like the aquarium water they’d fallen into. He stays quiet a moment longer and Dan thinks Phil is silently reflecting on the devastation and the memory of everything they’d endured, when Phil turns to him and says, “Bet you could roast a whole bag of marshmallows on there.”

Dan chokes, incredulous. “That’s it? The house blew up and you’re thinking of s’mores?”

“Well, what do you want me to say?” Phil laughs, his voice still wheezy from the smoke and the livid bruise Eris had left on his throat. “I’d make a pun about going out with a bang, but I thought considering the circumstances, it’d be a bit too blunt.”

“So you went with a food based quip instead.”

Phil straightens up to a more comfortable sitting position and shrugs, as if to say ‘what else is there to do but find some humor in it all’ and Dan privately agrees. Faced with a manor belonging to people who had forced them to confront loss, fear and contempt, why not toast the pyre strewn remains with a few caramelized marshmallows as a sweeter and more fitting sendoff?

“It blew up, but we survived, didn’t we?” Phil smiles, then in a quieter tone: “Because of you. You got us out.”

 “Of course I did.” Dan feigns an air of indignation and crosses his arms. “Was there ever any doubt?”

Phil smirks and seems as if he’s about to crack wise about just how many doubts he’d had, but then he stops and looks at Dan in a true moment of lingering reflection so intense it makes Dan falter and uncross his arms.

“No. I never doubted you,” Phil says finally. “I told you. I trust you.”

It’s there again, a profound inflection of meaning behind his words unmistakable for anything else except, “I love you.” It hangs in the air between them, unstated but powerful, and it tingles along the nape of Dan’s neck in a cool shiver stronger than the breeze ruffling their hair. It’s the same uncanny sensation which had powered through Eris’ glamour to snap Dan back to attention despite the raw hunger drawing him towards the scent of Phil’s blood. Even then, bound as he was by the louder demands of a primitive and visceral urge which continues to haunt him in a subdued ache through his veins, he remembers how Phil’s words had surrounded him in the darkness, corralling his thirst and drawing him out of his stupor to hold him fast, devastating him completely with nothing more than an idle conversation about moving which had just been another longwinded way of saying, “I trust you; I love you.”  
 And here again, the power of what remains unsaid draws a tight ring around his thoughts and binds him more securely than the complicated knots Eris had tied around his wrists. He finds himself willing to be bound this time, content to be overtaken by the demonstration of someone else’s faith in him, perhaps more so when that person was Phil. Through all of this he still had no idea how exactly to define love, but he continues to stand by what he had told the Court before. He knew through Phil’s example the best of what love could be, of what it felt like to be truly loved when he was cared for by someone implicitly, without question or pretense. He knew what it was when love was just another word for loyalty and trust and compassion. When love was just another word for Phil.

 _It’s true_ , he thinks as he meets Phil’s gaze. _Love is an asset not a liability._

Large drops of dew stipple the strands of a cobweb hung between the swaying stalks of wildflowers next to his head and his eyes flicker between the constellated dots of the cobweb and those now appearing in the sky in the wake of the receding clouds. The contrast between the two has an eerie quality to it; a fleeting beauty in the points of light captured in place for a moment in time before the sun arrived to dissolve both away. In the crisp chill between evening and dawn Phil’s breath leaves ghostly trails of smoke that dissipate almost instantly ( _nothing lasts forever_ , a small unbidden voice whispers at the back of Dan’s mind and he thinks, _yes it’s true, there were no guarantees, not even for an immortal._ ) and he knows if he had a powerful enough telescope he might be able to see further still, past the clusters of light above his head, far enough to where dense nebulas of cosmic nurseries churned  out nascent stars waiting their turn to swirl into frothing brilliance. Thousands of years later, when those stars finally threw their glare to earth to change the constellations in the sky he thinks perhaps, in some form, he and Phil might just be there to see them, but if they weren’t, if they had only a clutch of years left to them instead of an eternity full, then he was content to have this present time to themselves now. It was enough. From Manchester to London, it had always been enough.

He breathes in the scent of petrichor, the fresh mint of dew and grass and the familiar high sweet attar he’d come to recognize as simply Phil, as simply love. The drone of sirens in the distance grows closer and he looks up one last time at the thin veil of clouds and stars in the sky and thinks, _we are Dan and Phil and this was a moment of time in our lives and whatever else happens next, however we go on to define the moments which follow, I’m ready to face it, to try and make something good out of it. For Teague, for Phil, for myself-I’m ready._

Dan turns his gaze from the stars back to Phil, himself luminous in ways Dan could never explain.

 “Hey, Phil?”

“What?”

“...Let’s go home.”

Phil looks at him, receives every nuanced message behind those three words without joke or question and smiles.

“Okay,” he says.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Orkhon script:** Yilmaz’s origins are from ancient Turkey and for the cryptogram she sets for Phil to find and solve, I wanted the code to be in her language, or in the original text she would have used and recognized at the time. It took me awhile to try to figure out exactly how her name would be translated from English to the Orkhon letters (and it’s probably completely wrong, let’s face it) but based on the translation guides I came up with a solution that seemed close. (found a way to include the example I drew after having trouble with a few image hosting sites.)  
>  for reference, 'Yilmaz' as read from right to left:  
> 
> 
> The pink quartz hippo Phil finds in the basement is based on his [ angry pink hippo lamp](https://twitter.com/amazingphil/status/834545001313009666?lang=en). (I haven’t seen it pop up in his videos, so I hope it’s not in storage or anything. It has such a neat design to it, exactly like carved quartz in a way.)
> 
>  **Cavall:** Cavall, the danish spitz in love with crisps, is based on the legend of the cadejo spirit, which like the gytrash Eris talks about, is a spirit of a dog which will either guide and protect travelers or cause their doom, depending on whether it’s the black one you encounter or the white one. (in some stories the white dog protects people from the black dog) It’s apparently a prevalent legend in Mexico, but my uncle told me a story years ago about my great grandfather traveling on horseback at night through a rural country road in Puerto Rico when he looked behind him and saw a white dog following at an even distance away from his horse. When he stopped to call out to it, the dog promptly stopped and curled up in the middle of the road. When he started forward again, the dog started walking again too. My uncle said my great grandfather had a strange feeling about this and did not get off his horse to go over to the dog, but he repeated this process of stopping to look behind him and seeing the dog stop too and then going forward again to hear the dog walking forward too. This continued the entire way home, but the dog never otherwise barked or wagged its tail or reacted in any other way at all. It was only when my great grandfather turned the horse into the path leading to his house and dismounted, that the dog raced towards him, brushed right by his feet and disappeared like a ghost. I didn’t know anything about the legend at the time and no one in my family had ever heard of it either so it was interesting to see how many parallels for this specific type of dog spirit exists across various countries and cultures. Cavall takes on both aspects of the legend, signaling the downfall of the Court and helping Dan and Phil (and also just being a good dog in general.) He’s named for King Arthur’s legendary hound and also for Neil Gaiman’s dog, Cabal.
> 
>  **Susan:** In Dan and Phil’s videos the name Susan becomes a running theme of sorts, like an inside joke for naming various characters and objects Susan as just the standard go to for when nothing else comes to mind. When I was re-reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King to refresh my memory for going in to see the movie (which based on reviews, I might wait to see after it comes out, because wow…people are salty about it.) in the books, the name Susan is also a running theme as well. Especially with one of the main characters, Susannah Dean, who when formally introducing herself, says, ‘Susannah Dean, daughter of….Dan,’ which I thought was a spooky but funny coincidence considering the context of the name with Dan and Phil. In the books, Susannah has a scene where she throws an oriza, a blue rimmed plate with sharpened edges which is thrown through the air to decapitate its victims. In the scene with Susan in the kitchen, I always wanted her to throw various objects at the vampire for them to escape, but after re-reading the moment with Susannah I decided on the dinner plates as a nod to the series and the shared name. (the line she says after, “there’s an elemental satisfaction to throwing those things” is also paraphrased from what Susannah says after throwing her first orizas as well.) It doesn’t do anything for the plot and it’s not an important detail but that’s just where my mind was when writing that at the time.
> 
> I need visual references most of the time when imagining places or layouts of homes to help me describe them in writing. For the Night Court’s manor then, much of the rooms inside are based on the Palazzo Vecchio, especially Cassandra’s Gallery which I imagined looking somewhat like the Palazzo’s ‘room of the elements.’
> 
> I made other notes about the story as I was writing it, more than I can fit here, but if you have any questions about anything please feel free to ask me.
> 
> And thank you again to all returning and new readers.


	12. Epilogue-Overture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > I just checked how the formatting of the story looks on my phone and there's a certain part which I think is much better viewed on a laptop than a mobile screen. I don't know if it might just be my phone however, but if you find one part of it difficult/impossible to read, I'd suggest switching to a computer instead.

 

  
  

“ _I love you both enchanted and very calm at the same time,  
 and I don’t fear anything that might await us.”_

-Tove Jansson

 

 

The problem with having hyper attuned senses, Dan thinks, is picking up on the slightest twinge and quiver of the emotions of every stranger around you so that the silent argument currently underway between a couple who both seem ready to burst at the seams with too much to say and not enough privacy to vent their differences in, fills up the Newbury station waiting room with an unpleasant stench similar to a burning building- so strong it makes your head pound and your eyes throb until you’re forced to abandon your comfortable seat underneath the warm air pouring out from the central heating vents and stand out on the platform waiting for the train to Paddington Station in the middle of an icy cold drizzling downpour at nine in the evening instead.

It’s not all bad however. Outside, the five alarm blaze of the couple’s brewing spat is diminished under the less offending aroma of rain and the more neutral scent of two other passengers waiting out on the platform with him. They’re standing off at a reasonable distance away so that their respective emotions- a humid odor of drowsiness that reminds him of fog and a less noticeable whiff of boredom that reminds him of the musty confines of a supermarket’s stockroom where he’d once spent tiresome early morning hours preparing orders for home deliveries- don’t overwhelm him to the point of distress. The weather is characteristically miserable, but it’s peaceful out here. More importantly, it’s simple and simple is something he thinks he could use a great deal of right now.

 Going back to Wokingham to visit family has been a week long ordeal of turning into a ninja spy on a stealth mission to avoid being spotted by old schoolmates while also trying to avoid unwanted conversations about his strict nocturnal habits. It had been more difficult to explain to his mother why he preferred to stay in a hotel rather than at her house as he usually did or why they had to meet up in the early evening hours rather than in the afternoon, disrupting her plans at treating him to brunch. She’d stopped pushing the issue eventually, but her doubts remained evident in the small cloud of frazzled emotions surrounding her in an oppressive aura that, although odorless, contained a palpable weight Dan could feel on his shoulders during the entirety of his visit with her like the crushing pressure of a deep sea dive about to snap him in half. Even Colin had paused dramatically in the middle of the hallway on seeing Dan, one paw raised in mid stride to stare at him with such a critically severe expression of distrust that Dan had been afraid he might start growling in rejection of the creature he clearly sensed Dan had become. Citing a need for privacy and not wanting to be a bother as part of his decision for booking a hotel room were easily conceived white lies, but how could he casually explain away why the family dog, once so loving and accepting of his presence, had decided to turn feral at the very sight of him? He’d frantically ticked off mental explanations about buying a new brand of cologne or accidentally getting a stray cat’s fur stuck to his trousers, but after another second of intense examination, Colin had visibly made up his mind with a philosophical huff of air through his nose and continued to pace over to Dan for his usual greeting of head pats and ear scratches, this time without a hint of hesitation or alarm. It turned out Cavall wasn’t the exception to the rule when it came to tolerating a vampire’s presence. He and Colin just happened to be dogs with more discerning instincts, allowing them to tell the difference between someone with good intentions and those with bad ones. In Colin’s mind, whatever Dan had become was secondary to who he was; to the person Colin remembered him to be. Now if only everyone else could accept his presence so unquestioningly as well, Dan had thought wearily as he’d fluffed the fur along Colin’s back.

He’d rather not have had to go through with the visit at all, but it had been some time since he’d last seen his family in person and he wasn’t sure when he might have the chance to do so again after tonight, when, if all went well, he and Phil would start a new chapter in the adventure of their lives together, one in which they’d need a considerable amount of time alone to sort things out. Better to deal with his family’s idle confusion now than field his grandmother’s accruing emails about why he continued to turn down every offer at a visit. He wouldn’t have put it past her to finally come knocking on their door with a legion of police officers behind her and demand an explanation for what was going on and if he was alright. It had taken some work however to pull off his visit without accidentally revealing his newly transformed nature. He’d carefully steered away from bright lights, afraid the wrong angle might cause his irises to flare up in a golden neon glow like an animal in the headlights, and he’d practiced talking in front of the mirror for weeks beforehand to keep from showing the lengthened points of the fangs in his mouth. It made every smile into an awkward tightlipped gesture like a living parody of the smiling loaf bloke meme and subdued his laughter into close mouthed chuckles like a strangled seal, affording him more quizzical looks than if he hadn’t laughed at all. All concerns about his considerably pronounced pallor and cold skin had been expertly deflected, though his grandmother continued to accuse him of not eating enough after he politely declined the small cakes she’d brought over for him to try. He’d just as neatly brushed off the puzzled expressions about his strong aversion to the bouquet of lilies and asters on the coffee table which had reminded him too much of Eris’ cloying perfume of floral decay. His mother had finally removed them to the kitchen after he refused to even enter the lounge. Later, on leaving back to his hotel to wait out the morning and discreetly heat up a container of blood on the portable hob he’d brought with him, he’d noticed the small bouquet sitting abandoned in its vase on the front porch outside. He’d answered every question pertaining to his appearance or his strange acronychal schedule with a well-timed observation about a recently finished home renovation or an offer to help give Colin a bath, until finally the conversation had veered into more agreeable territory revolving around the usual pleasantries of asking after Phil or inquiring what he was up to. Yet, even then, he could sense the undercurrent of suspicion hovering in the air above his head like a stroke of lightning biding its time to strike.

The hassle of not alarming his family had been quickly overshadowed by the relief of seeing them alive and well. Despite their concern for him, they remained unaffected by the events that had occurred nine months ago when so much had been thrown into question and chaos. The Night Court and their threats are a distant memory, but the echo of their menace continues to haunt him whenever he thinks of other Courts possibly moving in to take their place. What if they decided to take a renewed interest in Yilmaz’s new blood? Worse still, what if they decided to one-up Eris’ promise at revenge and moved to destroy his family without warning? How could he even begin to prepare for an eventuality like that? Could he even protect them at all if he were forced to confront a Court made up of legions of members and stewards to rival the old one? He had friends who would leap at the chance to help without question- George, Susan and even one strange character of a vampire called Jorin who had introduced himself from the shadows of an alleyway when Dan had been walking home late one night, nearly scaring him right out of his skin in the process, but no matter how loyal and committed their intentions were, they’d be no match against a violent initiative of vampires with better planning and cohesion than the four members of the Night Court he’d recently dealt with.

Nothing had happened yet, but the probability of chance suggested it could and Dan had apprehensively resigned himself to dealing with whatever happened when it happened only after Phil had discussed the worry with him and suggested they both try not to worry too much over bad thoughts which hadn’t come to pass.

“After all, your thoughts are responsible for the reality you create for yourself,” Phil had said. “What you most believe to be true will manifest itself as a physical affirmation of everything you think you deserve, for better or for worse.”

“Wow, where’d you get that from,” Dan had asked dryly. “A motivational-quote-a-day calendar?”

“No, just a tarot reading,” had been the simple reply and Phil would say no more on the subject.

They hadn’t spoken much about everything that had happened to them that night. Sometimes the subject would come up in spurts of anecdotes they would laugh over, like Phil munching salt and vinegar crisps in the middle of an impending catastrophe or Dan getting spooked by a dog he’d at first mistook for an alien, but then they’d remember Teague or Dan might fall to brooding over the memory of old conversations with Makhai and they’d both jump to change the subject quickly. Whatever Phil had meant by a ‘tarot reading’ obviously had to do with one of his many experiences in the manor, but he hadn’t found an opportunity to elaborate further. Not that Dan thought he needed to. Phil was right. It was better not to dwell on worst case scenarios and complicate his life more than it needed to be. Not that it was easy. Sometimes the bleak mood sneaked into Dan’s mind without any invitation on his part, hounding him with terrible images and bad ideas that couldn’t easily be quelled by trying not to think about it. Just the very effort of not trying somehow made it worse. Watching TV, listening to music or allowing Phil to wax eloquent about his strange encounters during his daily ventures to the shops, helped take the edge off and ease his mind back into focusing on the better reality of their survival and success. Yet, even then, on some nights his heart inexplicably pulled taut with a strange hollow kind of loneliness which had little to do with the secure presence of Phil sleeping soundly at his side and more to do with the metaphysical terror and anxiety of all the questions he still had no answers for- a muddled frame of mind difficult to waylay with conversation no matter how willing Phil might have been to discuss it with him. How could you talk your way around a topic largely subjective and rhetorical in which the answers came only as you went along, like a tarot reading where the results became clearer only after the foretold events had occurred?

 The Court had inadvertently taught him the great potential of his own strength of character and within these lessons he recognized himself; he saw the reflection of everything he had always aspired to be, embodied not within the elusive image of someone he admired from afar, but rather demonstrated in every action he himself made and in every word he spoke. He didn’t have to reach for the ideals of the aesthete intellectual in the hopes of becoming it. He was already clever; already wise, eloquent and open minded enough to understand there would always be things he would continue to learn and perhaps never understand. Beyond these traits he also had compassion and humor to set him apart from the Court’s arrogant savagery and make him triumph where they had failed, but despite knowing his own capabilities, despite recognizing his own resilience, the endless void of the future stretched out before him doesn’t appear any less nebulous or intimidating than it had before. Confidence and hard won victories could only go so far towards comforting him, not when he continued to try to understand a complex world through the eyes of something both human and not.

 “ _I am large. I contain multitudes_.” Another line of Walt Whitman’s had occurred to him during one prolonged bout of nocturnal introspection and he’d thought he’d never empathized so strongly with the sentiment behind those words until now. He knew the old adage about ‘being yourself,’ the same mass marketed advice printed on posters and t-shirts and subheadings in self-help articles, but what did being yourself mean when your conscious notion of yourself was multitudinous; too fluid and free and constantly shifting to possibly constrain or define? The Court had presented their own ideas about his existence, all of which he had rejected outright, but even if he was sure of who he was right now, there was no guarantee he would always be comfortable with that perspective as time went on. He knew he would always puzzle over what it meant to be Daniel Howell- to be a human, to be a vampire, to be a creature as varied and improbable as the creation of the universe itself. Aeacus had been right in one aspect at least. He still had no idea how to navigate the world as a vampire, let alone how to integrate that new aspect of his identity into his career without jeopardizing both peace of mind and security.

Beyond the existential aspect of it, when it came to dealing with his transformed physiology, he still struggled to repress pangs of hunger in public without his fangs filling his mouth and his eyes blotting to black. During one packed train ride when the smell of blood had crested to a mouthwatering frenzy, he’d slammed headlong into the closing doors in his panic to escape before anyone noticed the terrifying change in his face and had ended up leaving a noticeable dent in the metal frame everyone had stared at in disbelief as he’d staggered back out onto the platform seeing stars. When filming, he’d already crushed two camera lenses accidentally by exerting too much pressure on them and in liveshows the chat always complained about the lighting being much too dark when he tried to avoid revealing the strange fluorescent glow of his eyes. To divert more persistent comments about his distinct pallor he engaged video filters beforehand to oversaturate and smooth his appearance, usually favoring the filter called ‘glamour’ as his own personal inside joke. But still he worried what might happen if he was being interviewed on stage in front a crowd of hundreds of people and he suddenly flashed his fangs with an unguarded laugh or what might happen if his eyes became dark pits before he could dive out of sight in time to conceal them? Rumors might start to fly about him trying out the vampire lifestyle, followed quickly by debate about whether or not he really drank blood and if so, if he was really trying out a lifestyle or a dangerous fetish instead. Some might take it in stride at first, joking about it with a string of memes and fanfictions, at least until he started avoiding convention panels during the daytime and began uploading Day in the Life videos at night to turn idle jokes into serious demands for answers in ways much more instigating and detrimental than the Court’s own demands had been. What if their suspicions in turn attracted the alarm of advertisers who didn’t want to be associated with his odd reputation or what if the already skeptical eye of traditional media turned up their nose at any mention of his name in the future if he approached them with ideas for collaborative projects, not wanting to have anything to do with someone they couldn’t take seriously as a YouTuber and definitely not as someone who now also had delusions of being a vampire. Then, what if the government had their own set of operatives like the X-Files monitoring for any whispers of supernatural beings and he was suddenly paid a visit by the UK’s version of Scully and Mulder who’d throw him into a reinforced cell they’d never let him escape from?

Phil had stared at him with a glazed look in his eyes as he’d rambled on for a half an hour about getting probed by MI-5 until he’d had enough and interrupted Dan to say, “if the Court and Teague have been around for as long as they have without a problem, then it shouldn’t be a problem for you either. As for the rest of it, we’ve been doing what we do for years and we’ve been able to manage the worst of comments and questions just fine. Well, I think so anyway. There’s no reason we can’t still handle it now. You’re overthinking things again. We survived, we’re okay. Who knows what’ll happen next, but I’ll be with you to figure it out together as we go along like we’ve always done. Now sit down, shut up and watch My Hero Academia with me.”

Dan had flopped down almost immediately next to Phil on the sofa, too exhausted by his own churning brain to protest further. Phil, once again, had been right. They’d been able to confront the Night Court’s worst challenges and interrogations and emerge intact, even if it had been a close call at the end. They were alive, they were here, with their trust in each other unshaken and stronger for all they’d endured, so why consume himself with worry? Still, in the longer hours of the night, when the flat was uncharacteristically silent and Phil was steeped in dreams, unable to distract him, Dan worried. He wanted to protect this peaceful interlude in their lives, to keep all troubles and conflicts at bay for as long as possible to focus on the course of their lives together; nourish all his creative goals and aspirations to fruition and encourage all of Phil’s creative goals in turn as well so that in between the success of their private lives and their public ones they could reach a new plateau of contentment. One in which the prying claws of gossip and suspicion had no effect and  his ongoing internal debate about who and what he was took on the kinder light of an explorative venture he’d be thrilled rather than intimidated by to discover more about with every passing year. But all it would take was one mistake, a tiny slipup, and he’d invite an avalanche of repercussive controversy to bring the fragile peace of their new beginning together to an untimely crashing halt.

Perhaps, as Phil had said, if that ever happened they could deal with it together and make it work despite how impossible it might seem at the time, but he wanted the opportunity to enjoy fulfilling all their most personal and professional aspirations before he was forced to figure their way out of another dilemma where fire and falling statues couldn’t solve their problems. He’d always thought facing the onset of adulthood might involve figuring out how to budget grocery shopping or managing the intricacies of what it meant to live on your own without your parents to sort out your life for you, not configuring lighting setups to account for being undead or wondering how to manage the cosmic responsibility implied with being a powerful immortal or trying to protect yourself and the ones you loved from the fallout of unwanted scrutiny. But although Aeacus had been right about the challenges of coming to terms with being a vampire and being himself at the same time, he had been wrong about Dan being forced to face those difficulties alone. Apart from Phil, he now also had George to help ease the stress and worry of his worst unbidden thoughts.

In the weeks following the Court’s destruction, George had recovered well from his injury and he had always made sure to keep in touch, offering his assistance or company whenever it might be needed. Dan hadn’t seriously taken him up on his offer until a month later when he’d spontaneously decided to go on an evening walk together with George. He’d been unsure at first. Being a homebody was a habit difficult to break and London wasn’t always hospitable to pedestrians who walked the streets at night, whether alone or not, and though as a vampire any would be thieves had more to fear from him he wasn’t exactly looking forward to the risk of a confrontation. However, as the night had worn on without incident, he’d found himself enjoying both the experience and the conversation. George had been surprisingly helpful in granting him a different perspective on how to cope with all the intricacies of his transformed nature and on returning home Dan had found himself curiously refreshed, not so tense and uneasy anymore. Somehow, being able to speak with someone who not only understood his private struggles, but had also lived it himself made a difference. _The power of relatable bants_ , he’d mused with a smile. On Phil’s encouragement their one evening walk turned into a weekly outing, filling up otherwise lonely hours of introspection with a peaceful kind of active meditation instead during which time George had taken to giving him a crash course on everything a vampire needed to know to survive.

Under the sedate glow of starlight and the harsher buzz of streetlamps, he spoke of the dubious origins of their existence, equally as mysterious as that of humans, subject to many explanations both mystical and scientific where no one had yet come to a satisfying conclusion everyone could agree on. He mentioned the Night Court and how its first ancient incarnation had come into power; he spoke of how the black plague had launched an era of prejudice and hysteria over ‘spoiled blood’ and how as a result scores of vampires had been executed by the European Courts to prevent the plague from spreading or infecting other vampires when in reality they had only been afraid of dissenters or those who they deemed to be of ‘low breeding’ trying to infiltrate their ranks, leading to the wholesale destruction of many vampires within the Courts themselves- a campaign of terror inspired by treachery and greed. George had then gone on to explain how the aftermath of this hysteria had later leaked into the conscious of human imagination, giving rise to the old myths and legends of wild blood sucking revenants that had gone on to influence Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in effect ushering in a new era of intrigue and misinformation when it came to how humans envisioned vampires in their stories and films.

 In between these cautionary tales of sociology and history, George also gave Dan a rundown of a vampire’s preternatural biology, more specifically on how to tame every errant reflex to avoid revealing what he was to humans. He instructed Dan on how to make glamour less of an uncomfortable mental assault and more of a benign hypnotic suggestion for people not to take notice of his eyes or the sharp flash of fangs they might have glimpsed when he spoke. He learned how to suppress his hunger in public and how to hone his senses to a diamond point of precision until he could hear the heartbeat of a person a mile away and could smell the wafting aroma of Phil’s contented mood before he’d even stepped foot inside the flat. He also learned how to deaden his senses so that the world wasn’t such a riot of sound and color assaulting his brain with a tidal wave of information every time he stepped outside.

 “It’s like public transport,” George had said to him as they’d ambled by Hyde Park one night. “The first time you try it, it’s overwhelming- too much to process all at once while worrying if you’re doing it right or wrong, but by the fourth go at it, things start to become commonplace, your brain relaxes into the routine of it. By the eighth go, you’re truly settled in, like every seasoned commuter you see who looks completely unfazed by anything anymore, whether they’re glancing at the guy carrying a mastiff in a duffel bag over his shoulder or the busker screaming bloody murder at the other end of the carriage. It’s all part of the scenery for them. They know where they’re going and what to do without even having to think twice about it.”

“I don’t know. I’ve been living here for what- four, five years now? And I still get lost and flustered when I take public transport.”

George had shrugged. “Could be the learning curve is longer for some people or maybe it takes a bit longer to get used to it all, but trust me, if you keep at it; keep practicing, then living and being what you are now will become an ingrained part of you no different than breathing used to be. It’s like beginning anything new. You have to commit yourself to the act, be confident in what you mean to do and get on with it the best you can. Everything else tends to fall into place after. Maybe not all at once, maybe a bit at a time, but eventually it will.”

“You sound so sure of yourself,” Dan had said. “Has it worked out for you? You know…after leaving the Court? Has everything ‘fallen into place?’ ”

“Not everything. The answers don’t come any easier than they did before. They probably never will, but let’s just say I’m in a better place than I used to be. I feel more like myself now. Less like I’m struggling to fit in someone else’s shadow.” George had looked up at the clear night sky above their heads and gazed for a long moment at the yellowed face of the moon hanging between an encroaching scrim of clouds. “You were right, you know. There’s a world of opportunities out here to explore and make of my life what I want. It’s still difficult to manage. You know, things don’t miraculously become kinder and comprehensible overnight. I still have my moments where I question it all, but I’d rather have this than an eternity spent being someone I hated. Thanks for showing me that instead of slagging me off like I probably deserved back when I first spoke to you.”

Dan protested that he hadn’t done anything worth thanking; that the decision to live independently had been all George’s doing, but George wouldn’t hear of it. He’d insisted on showing his gratitude by teaching Dan everything he had learned in his short tenure as a vampire. He taught Dan how to embrace people without accidentally crushing them, something which had come in handy during his small family reunion and would prove more useful in meet and greets where hugging a subscriber and snapping their ribcage in the process was generally frowned upon. He also learned how to drink from humans without killing them if he ever found himself caught out by the sudden urgency of hunger and when he mentioned his unease about other Courts possibly wanting to attack him or Phil, George taught him how to defend himself by covering the basics of boxing and grappling in the incongruous training ground of the graffiti scoured Leake Street tunnel. Dan had felt a bit like a badass in an action movie montage, learning how to fight beneath the colorful banners of spray painted art on the walls, until he forgot to block a punch to the chest and ended up flat on his back like a flipped turtle.

Afterwards, he learned very quickly he was better at defense than offense, something George picked up on as well when he switched tactics to show Dan how to effectively dodge and use the cover of shadows to evade potential conflicts when opportunity allowed. When it came to the more quotidian details of daily living, George explained which butchers had the best prices and quality for the blood he needed and which type of blinds and window films were best at blocking sunlight. As his studies continued and his skills grew, so did his confidence as well. He wasn’t yet at the point where everything felt natural, but he was getting close. For one thing he no longer felt like he needed to tread carefully around Phil out of fear of harming him. His hunger was manageable, no longer a slinking wild creature he struggled to subdue, although the smell of Phil’s blood and the liquid pulse of his heart remained enticing temptations that daily teased his self-control. But it was nothing like how it had been in the beginning when he’d just been turned or when Eris had stoked his urge into a frenzy of overriding need.

Things were different now, just like so many other things in his life were different. He wasn’t sure when he’d reach the end of his learning curve or if the curve itself would prove to be an infinite loop of experiences that would continue to expand the breadth of his knowledge as his life extended out through the years on into the centuries, rife with new lessons for him to embrace. It remained to be seen if it would all be worth sticking around for however, a question not even George’s experience and practical wisdom could answer, not when it would be up to Dan to decide for himself.

 Universal meaning was a grab bag of theories dependent on personal perspective. He could easily decide it was worthwhile one day and just as easily despair at all existence the following week. And still he wondered, with a world mired in what seemed like so much unrest and chaos, would he be able to cope with the senseless examples of savagery that Aeacus and the rest of the Court had sought to teach him? Would he still be able to find refuge in examples of creativity, humor and compassion when his old friends and family faded away to distant memory? He still struggled with the idea of his place in the grand void of the universe and he wasn’t sure if he’d ever reach a point where everything slotted into place perfectly, but for now, at this moment in time where he stood under the slanted awning of a station platform waiting for the train to take him home, he’s concerned only in thinking about Phil and all the ways they’d go on to redefine their lives by the time this night was over.

A small waterfall of rain trickles over the edge of the awning above his head, pooling down onto the tracks below. If the drizzle picks up and turns into a downpour it’s likely to flood the station completely, but based on the lackluster weather reports for the area Dan doesn’t think that will happen. The great storm which had heralded so many upheavals and revelations had already passed, taking with it scores of waterlogged cars, millions in property damage and one friend whose value could never be replaced. It was strange to think Teague was gone. Dan had always thought of him as the person who would go on to show him the ropes, not George. On every outing through the city, Dan kept expecting to turn around and find Teague casually perched on top of a red pillar box the same way he’d been when they’d first met. Susan, the one person who seemed to know Teague best of all, had stopped by a few times on his and Phil’s invitation as a way of extending an offer of friendship and gratitude for all she had done to help Phil. She’d graciously accepted with a return offer to take them both on road trips in her McLaren, an offer Phil had politely but quickly turned down. When their conversations had inadvertently turned to mention Teague she hadn’t reacted much except to nod her head along with whatever Phil had been saying at the time, clearly still too bothered by his absence to even talk about him in fond remembrance, as if doing so only cemented his passing and she wasn’t ready to accept it yet. Dan hadn’t blamed her. He wasn’t sure he could accept it either. Thinking about it only made him angry, more so frustrated at not having been able to do anything to stop Teague’s headlong plunge into the blaze beneath their feet, dragged along in the undertow of Eris’ manic fury. Strange to think how so much destruction could have been caused by four people and their twisted rhetoric, but so much more satisfying to think how their uncontested reign had all come crashing down by nothing more than the efforts of an unlikely group of people. It gave Teague’s sacrifice a bittersweet edge, to know he hadn’t died in vain, that they had emerged victorious to continue living their lives in ways far removed from the Court’s cruel philosophies. It’s a small consolation, but a viable one nonetheless and Dan holds on to it as a reminder that perhaps the trudge of eternity might not prove to be as dark and destructive as his worst thoughts suggested it might be, not when there were people like George and Susan and Phil to face the darkness of uncertainty with the small but powerful light of their determined wills.

 _Or maybe it sounds more poetic and hopeful in my head than it actually is,_ he thinks as he retreats away from the small cascade of water splashing over the awning close to his feet. _But I guess I’ll see what happens as time goes on._

He paces over to a lone metal bench against the wall of the ticket office and plops himself down, shoving his hands deep in his jacket pockets to prevent the icy nip of the wind from freezing off his fingers. The cold isn’t as uncomfortable as it might have been when he was still human, but it’s still unpleasant to be caught out in the dreary murk of soaking rain when he could be inside enjoying a cheeky bask under the heating vents if not for the couple inundating the place with the burning stench of their silent standoff. Thanks to George, he could cancel out the sound of their heartbeats and the smell of their blood if he concentrated hard enough, but certain strong emotions were as of yet beyond his capability to neutralize, leaving him stranded out on the platform to huddle for warmth the best he could before his train arrived.

His phone chimes suddenly with an incoming text and before he pulls it out to check the screen he already knows it’s from Phil. He can’t help smiling as he reads the glowing notification. Phil’s timing was always impeccable, albeit sometimes bad when it came to knocking down an entire wall of soundproofing tiles in the gaming room with his butt as he turned around, but right now, when in need of a better diversion from the cold, Dan thinks Phil’s timing is nothing but good.

 

Where are u?

                                                                           On the platform turning into an ice sculpture. You?  

Why not the waiting area? And I just  
woke up from a nap so good I think I’m  
going to write an entire book trilogy about it.

                                                                             Couple in the waiting area letting off serious aggro vibes  
                                                                             like they’re about to erupt. Smelled awful so I’m outside now.  
                                                                             Nice to hear you had an epic sleep though.

I did! When you get home I’ll tell you all about it.

                                                                                   Not much for audio books. I’ll wait for the hardcover  
                                                                                   edition to come out.  
Funny.  
  
Oh! Almost forgot- Wirrow texted me  
and said Cavall got into a packet  
of McCoy's today.

                                                                                      WHAT  
                                                                                      Don’t tell me he ate the whole thing??

No it’s ok. It was one of those small  
snack sized packets and he only  
managed a few nibbles before he got caught.  
Cavall’s fine. See? Bryony sent me  
this right after.

                                                                               

                                                                                          Looks very proud of himself, doesn’t he?     
                                                                                          Well, that’s a relief. I looked it up earlier and dogs  
                                                                                          definitely shouldn’t be eating anything crisps related.

I know, but he’s in good hands with Wirrow  
and Bryony. Though, when we finally move out  
in a few more months and we get to  
keep him with us, we’ll be the ones having  
to play food inspector.

                                                                                           Great. I’m looking forward to being a pet owner and  
                                                                                           yelling, “what is that in your mouth?!” every other  
                                                                                           hour along with a full blown heart attack.

 

Yeah, but it’s worth it.

                                                                                            Yeah, it is. Have you thought of another name  
                                                                                            for him yet since you weren’t keen on keeping  
                                                                                            his old one?

Not yet. I just don’t know about keeping  
a name that comes from the latin for ‘horse.’  
I mean, he’s a dog?

                                                                                            True. As long as you don’t come up with  
                                                                                            anything too generic like snowball or fido.  
                                                                                              

It’s better than naming him dank…

                                                                                            I wasn’t being serious!  
                                                                                            Besides that’s when I thought dank was the Danish  
                                                                                            word for ‘Danish.’ You know, a play on words  
                                                                                            with him being a Danish spitz and all. Like a pun.

A bad one.

                                                                                           Fine.

Hey, so, are you ready?

                                                                                           I should be asking you that.

I’ve been thinking about it all day, but I am.

                                                                                           It doesn’t have to be tonight you know.  
                                                                                           It doesn’t even have to be this month or  
                                                                                           this year if you’re not sure.

I’m sure.

                                                                                           Then yes, I’m ready. I’ll be home soon.

 Okay. See you then.

 

Dan reads the last message over and his hand tightens its grip on the phone. He’d wondered if Phil might change his mind at the last second, but Phil’s words, simple as they are, communicate his intent perfectly and Dan’s chest tightens with a thrill of nervous excitement over how much things would change because of it. When it did, there would be no turning back.

 That was the thing about commitments which had always been scary to him- the permanence of it in a world that itself was so impermanent and ephemeral. Nothing was certain, nothing was guaranteed, not even as an immortal if the Court’s demise was any indication, but no matter how much things might change, no matter how much they might remain the same, he’s ready. It’s the same self-affirming thought he’d held onto back when his entire world had consisted of a burning manor violently destroying itself around him and he couldn’t be sure if he was ready for anything at all. Now however, sitting on a windswept platform waiting for the train which would soon ferry him on into a new unprecedented era in their lives, he’s certain.

 _Me and Phil together,_ he thinks. _We’re ready._

“You look like you’re having fun.” The silhouette of a person falls over the bench and a low voice suddenly interrupts Dan’s thoughts as he begins to slide the phone back into his pocket. When his head jerks up in surprise to see who could have caught him off guard without so much as a heartbeat or footsteps to give away their approach, he nearly drops the phone straight onto the floor.

“ _You?_ ”

Dan stares up, incredulous, and suddenly the chill of the wind is displaced by the icier burn of fright and frustration.

“Always the same tone of voice whenever I visit people. You’d think I had a bad reputation.”

Yilmaz smiles at him and without waiting to ask whether he wants company or not, let alone hers, she takes a seat next to him on the bench, one leg crossing over the other in an elegant gesture that reminds him of a lion crossing its front paws in a contented pose after successfully catching its prey. Her signature long plait of grey white hair is concealed under the wide brimmed hood of the long black trench coat she wears and in her hands she holds a leather briefcase which she begins to idly drum her fingernails on in time to the rainfall against the awning above their heads.  
They look at each other for a moment in silence, taking each other’s measure. Yilmaz’s posture is casual, relaxed, without any visible hint of a threat, but Dan remains on guard. He’d wondered if he might ever see her again and now that she’s in front of him he wonders if she might harbor a grudge after the Court’s defeat despite her complicated history with them. Her involvement in their schemes remains unclear, just like her reasons for turning him. Who knew what her true motives were or why she had chosen tonight to reveal herself after being absent for so long? When he samples the air to get a read of her emotions, Dan picks up a trace of licorice and smoky incense, fragrances his brain instantly translates as belonging to someone with a cryptic secret, the one thing he has little patience for tonight. He’d played enough mind games with the Court. He wasn’t keen on playing another round now.

“What are you doing here?” He blurts the question out impatiently once the silence between them grows intolerable.

“Hmm, no time for waffling greetings or social pleasantries, I see.” The smile never leaves her face as she says it. In fact, Dan thinks she looks oddly proud. “That’s alright. After everything you went through I probably wouldn’t be pleased to see me either, but don’t worry. I’m not here to threaten or harm you and the same goes for those you love as well.”

Dan says nothing, still wary and on edge despite her declarations of good will. She’d seemed just as benign back in the flower shop that night, when he’d first thought she was just an eccentric shop owner with a talent for piano; certainly not an ancient vampire who would dramatically shift the course of his life forever.

“I won’t take up much of your time,” she continues. “I have places I need to be myself, but as paying you a house call seemed inappropriate I thought I’d catch you here to congratulate you.”

Dan frowns. “Congratulate me? For what?”

“For surviving, for one thing. For destroying the Night Court for another.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“Which makes the victory all the sweeter,” she says. “You did wonderfully by the way, especially considering you’re my only new blood to have achieved something so monumental.”

Dan closes his eyes and rubs his left temple in an aggravated circle. “Is this what you wanted the whole time? To use me, to have me put on a show for you like the Court wanted me to do for them?”

“No. To be sure, the performance was incredible, but nothing compared to all you demonstrated and proved that night.”

“Which was what exactly?”

“Resilience, compassion, independence, wisdom and strength-all the usual hallmarks of humanity necessary to accomplish anything worthwhile.” Her fingers stop their idle drumming on the briefcase. “It’s extraordinary. You succeeded where others have failed. At long last, the Night Court in London is no more.”

“If it was that important to you why didn’t you just do the job yourself? You’re supposed to be the most powerful vampire, aren’t you? Or one of them at least? They were intimidated by you. You could have destroyed them yourself years ago and saved a lot of trouble. You could have saved Teague.”

At the mention of Teague’s name Yilmaz’s face takes on a blank expression he can’t read and the smell of incense and licorice about her momentarily crests into a pungent aroma.

“Yes, it’s true. I could have saved him,” she says. “I suppose he’d already told you I was the one who sired him.”

It had been Phil actually who had relayed the story to Dan about Teague’s brief revelation concerning his origins, but neither of them had discussed it further, not with Teague’s death too fresh in their minds to talk about him without becoming frustrated and sad. Dan says nothing however and listens to Yilmaz as she continues.

“When I first met Teague I thought he might be the one to destroy the Court. He had your same brand of fortitude and a cynical view of those in power, being a serf as he was, one who came from a long lineage of villeins forced into service for the nobles who owned the lands they lived on. By his time, the old laws governing villeins were slowly phasing out to make way for new opportunities at independence. Feudal servitude was becoming less of the norm, but old reputations are difficult to shake when idle gossip seeks to constrain someone within narrow minded perceptions and so, without enough money to join a guild and a family name forever tainted with the notoriety of the servants they had always been, in effect denying them better chances at social advancement, Teague was caught in a revolving circle of subjugation he could never escape.”

“Until you came along,” Dan says.

“Yes. I recognized great potential in him. I met him one evening while I was traveling up a winding path through his village and he wasn’t afraid of me, even though widespread superstitions about the fair folk and witches made people cautious of wandering the streets at night for fear of encountering unfamiliar strangers who were more than they appeared to be. If anything, Teague admired the freedom I represented, to go where I wished and to do as I pleased, whereas he was tethered by the laws of compulsory fealty. I represented a freedom he’d never known and had always wanted to have. He wanted his existence to mean something more than paying dues to his manorial bonds. He wanted his own lands and his own right to love whom he pleased and to be happy as he pleased- in short, he wanted his own life.”

Dan nods in agreement. “Who wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know if he suspected I was something other than human or if he was merely drawn to the novelty of danger in wandering across the fields at night to see if he could glimpse me on the road, but we met for many pleasant conversations over the next few months and he spoke to me of his great dreams of wanting to learn, to travel and to make his own mark on the world. If he had been born in your time I believe he would have made an independent career for himself as you did. Perhaps as an incisive entrepreneur or a you tuber, if that is the correct term.” She pronounces the phrase as two distinct words, stretching the vowels and pronouncing the ‘T’ with a harsh inflection.

“He probably would’ve done well.” Dan gives a small smile. “Maybe filming daily vlogs or comedy sketches.”

“Yes, even as a human Teague had incredible insight about the human condition, full of wit and clever ideas. He’d have died at an early age, victim of whatever sickness was in vogue at the time or perhaps he’d have criticized the wrong official and been hanged for his insolence. It seemed unfair to allow all that light and fierce potential to be extinguished in its prime.”

“So you turned him into a vampire.”

Yilmaz nods. “I did and like you he fought and like you he survived the early days of his transformation, acclimating well even though I wasn’t around to help him, only watching from afar to gauge his reaction at finally having his long sought after freedom. I wanted to see if he might throw away all pretense of compassion and become the example of intolerant power he detested. It was important he do it alone without my instruction to influence him, for I’ve always believed people become more truly what they are at heart when left to their own devices to face conflict and uncertainty.”

“It’s a bit harsh isn’t it? To just abandon people when they need help the most,” Dan asks, remembering his own struggle in the hours following his transformation and how terrifying and confusing it had been to face it alone until he’d met Teague. “You don’t just take someone’s life, yank them into a new one and walk away as if it has nothing to do with you.”

“Ah, but they _don’t_ have anything to do with me. I give them a new life they might not have expected or wanted, it’s true, but it’s no different than the idea of God bringing the world into existence and stepping back to allow things to run their course without intervention. People will decide to live as they please whether I instruct them or not. A child can be born into a law abiding household and still grow up to be a murderer. There are no predictable variables about life, Daniel. How the process of survival unravels is up to personal interpretation. No one will ever give you an instruction manual or lead you by the hand like a lost child. Such has been the way of the world since it was created.”

“For someone who wanted to see the Court fall, you sound just like them.” Dan frowns and turns his face away. “Maybe you won’t always have someone to hold your hand in life, but it doesn’t hurt to have the help when you need it most. A lot of things would be different if people thought that way.”

“Maybe, and then again maybe not. Some things are better learned on one’s own and some help is better received when it comes from within, but either way, my methods don’t have to be your own. I imagine whenever you decide to turn someone you will be there to guide them where I was not.”

Dan says nothing and out of the corner of his eye he sees Yilmaz smile.

“Of course, Teague might not have acclimated well to the transformation at all,” she continues. “It could have gone wrong, but like you he persevered through the vicious urge of his instincts, corralling them with effort to keep his humanity intact. And that is when I thought, ‘ah, this is one who will bring the Court to their knees and overthrow their reign.”

“Why though?” Dan turns back to look at her.

Yilmaz raises an eyebrow at the question. “Why what?”

“Like I said before, why couldn’t you do it yourself? Why wait for Teague or for me or anyone else?”

“Because I was never sure if it was worth eradicating the Night Court for our sake when so many wanted to usurp their power just to reinstate more of the same status quo. I saw many new bloods confront them with plans of sedition so they could take their place as the uncontested rulers, with all the corruption and bloodshed that went along with the job. I’d have cleared a path only to see the old regime of the Court repeat itself in a new generation of vampires.”

She stares at him and her eyes gather the light of the lamps above them in an unsettling glow. “I am no paragon of virtue. I have killed humans for the lesser offense of being rude to me, just like I did with the flower shop owner that night. In the past I enjoyed my own brief history as someone revered in secret as a deity who drank blood sacrifices and terrorized both humans and vampires alike, but I grew out of that violent existence and rejected it for something better than savage impulse. Traveling the world and directing theatre allowed me a different perspective on existence until I wanted something more than the same inheritance of terror and bloodshed the Court offered. I’d already lived through countless years of war, watching people, cultures and languages become devastated by imperial might, I wasn’t about to hand over the reins of power to those who couldn’t learn from history’s lessons.” Yilmaz’s voice descends into a throaty rumble as anger colors the pallor of her face to a dusky red. “I had always told the Court since their inception that one of my own would bring them down and they believed it like a prophecy, though I wasn’t sure such a thing would happen at all. Every new blood I made was a litmus test to find someone strong enough to stand up to them, someone who could be tempted by their power and promises and still resist. In Teague I saw some hope for us, I saw a light of redemption for the world as a whole, but when I revealed my plans to him he rejected me completely.”

“Yeah, from how he spoke of you he was never really a fan,” Dan says dryly.

“As was to be expected. I’d abandoned him and then returned from thin air with a proposal that sounded too much like the indentured servitude he’d struggled to leave behind. He saw me as one more highborn noble trying to use him as the means to an end, which wasn’t inaccurate I suppose. He wanted nothing to do with me or the Court. He said I should figure out my own problems as I had left him to figure out his. Then he ran away from me and spent the rest of his life running away from me whenever possible. I believe that’s partially why he became such a successful info broker, always listening in for a word on my whereabouts so he could always stay four steps ahead. I imagine when he met you and you mentioned I was the vampire responsible for turning you, he must have thought it was a complex plan of mine to get him involved with the Court again, when of course it was just a coincidence you two should meet.”

“So why didn’t the Court go after him like they did with me, knowing he was your new blood?”

“Because they never really knew. There were rumors and whispers, but nothing was ever confirmed and they could never believe that a serf of all things would bring their rule to an end. They might not have believed the rumors about you either, until they saw the security footage from the flower shop to confirm my presence.”

“So you got what you wanted then.” This time Dan feels his own face suffuse with a red heat of anger. “I should be the one congratulating you. Teague’s gone and so is the Court. You can enjoy your victory.”

The smell of coveted secrets spins about her, stronger than ever but Yilmaz only smiles and says, “we both can enjoy the victory. After tonight you will go off to make a new legacy for yourself and my part in your story will end here. You won’t ever have to fear being involved in another convoluted plot or conspiracy ever again.”

“I don’t know. There’s a host of YouTube conspiracy videos out there that say otherwise,” Dan says casually.

“In the spirit of extending help, I thought you should have this before I leave.” Yilmaz unsnaps the briefcase in her lap and opens it to reveal a sheaf of folders. She pulls one off the top and hands it to him. Dan begins to reach for it warily, then stops, immediately suspicious.

“What is this?”

“Just read it. It’s not a contract with the devil.” Yilmaz laughs.

Dan stares at her a moment longer, unsure whether to take the folder or not, but then, after thinking what did he have to lose anyway when he’d already risked his life with the Court and survived, he takes the folder from her and opens it to read the papers inside. For a moment he doesn’t understand. There are papers full of legal jargon he can’t be bothered to decipher and other papers with his name printed next to what seems to be monetary figures crammed with too many zeroes.

“I don’t- what is-?” He falters to get a word out and fails, his eyes drawn over and over to his name and the large sum of money next to it.

‘It’s your inheritance. Well, so to speak.”

“My…my…what now?” Dan struggles to speak past a throat gone suddenly dry.

“Much of the Court’s assets have been liquidated and the remainder not seized by creditors is yours,” Yilmaz says. “Though I was never physically present to be considered a member of the Court, I had equal stake in their businesses and accounts, effectively making me a shareholder. As my new blood, as my heir, you have equal stake as well, and as the one responsible for destroying the Court I thought it only fair for you to have both my share and that of the Court’s.”

She pulls out another folder and opens it to reveal a bundle of papers which all seem to be land deeds. “Their many properties here in London are also yours, along with the wreckage of the manor in Totteridge and its vast acreage of land."

“I don’t want it,” Dan says immediately. “I don’t know-sell it, recycle it, do whatever you want, but I don’t want it. Not even the land it’s on.”

“I thought as much. I did have plans to place it on the market before transferring the deed into your name, but I thought I’d let you decide.”

“Just sell it then and donate the money to charity. Let something good come out of that place for once.”

“Very well.” She takes the deed for the Totteridge manor and places it back in the briefcase before producing another folder filled with bank and accountant details. “These are all the networks of private banks in which the Court regularly invested money. Now their accounts along with their accountants belong to you.”

Dan suddenly feels dangerously lightheaded as he stares once again at the figures listed until they melt into an unsteady blur on the page. With this amount of money he and Phil could retire from YouTube this very night, buy a private island and build a mansion on it stocked with koi ponds, tropical plants, Steinway pianos and a personal satellite for the best Wi-Fi connection in the world and still have enough money left over to make Solomon blush.

“The Court amassed a great deal of wealth over the centuries as you can imagine. Some of it was gathered through black market trade deals and the profits gathered from those transactions are locked in a private offshore account which would raise too many questions should you try to access it. That money, illicit as it is, is unfortunately lost, but the Court also owned two active legitimate companies, one dealing with retail and the other in marketing, both of which you are, as of now, the chief stockholder and owner. They’ve performed well consistently and have excellent profit margins. You may keep them to expand the scope and influence of your own retail company or pass it off as you please.” She hands over another folder with more papers inside and Dan takes it with a slightly trembling hand as he opens it to stare down at the letterhead. Below the logo of a stylized hibiscus flower motif he sees his name listed as the director and owner of the companies Yilmaz had mentioned.

“If you decide to keep them you will have the benefit of an experienced board of directors to advise you in any new ventures you’d like to make,” Yilmaz continues. “The marketing firm is also affiliated with a subsidiary production company which I imagine would come in useful to help you adapt any shows or films you might like to create in the future. If the world of mass media won’t lend you the benefit of the doubt, then you can do as you’ve always done and make a place for yourself in their midst without having to ask for their consideration. Perhaps you might even sponsor younger creators and grant them opportunities you never had when you first started out.”

“You…I mean-this is-” Dan trails off, too overwhelmed with information and new wealth to speak properly.

 Yilmaz nods her head appreciatively. “I understand. It’s a lot to grasp all at once. As I said, you don’t have to keep any of it should you find it more trouble than it’s worth, but if you think you can manage it, if you think you can make something good from this as you’ve made a habit of doing with your career all these years, then take the opportunity and set new challenges and goals for yourself. Allow their misfortune to be your triumph.”

“You’re just giving this to me.” Dan frames the question as a stated fact, his voice low and monotone with shock. “You’re giving this-all of this- to me. Even your share of the profits. …Why?”

“As I said, I believe you’ll make good use of it and I have my own vast treasury of wealth apart from the Court. This is pocket change in comparison.” Yilmaz smiles as Dan stares at her, dumbfounded. “Then, I’ve never made much use of what I do have, what would I do with all this? I kept my investments active only so I could take the rest on the inevitable day when the Court fell, to pass it on to someone worthy enough to have it.”

Dan stares back down at the folders in his hand containing luxury properties, bank accounts flush with cash and two active companies, all of which he was now the sole owner.

 _Well not for long, as soon as I get Phil on the papers too_ , he thinks. _Which means I’ve already decided to keep all this. Holy shit, what a night. From comfortably rich to ridiculously wealthy. None of this feels real-it’s like I should be waking up from a dream any second now._

“There’s also this.” Yilmaz reaches back into the briefcase and Dan blanches at the idea of being gifted another dossier filled with more financial details to pad his king’s ransom of riches even further. In the next instant however he finds himself staring at a small pink hippo statue Yilmaz holds out for him to take. It’s a strange thing and heavy in his hands as he turns it over, admiring the light glinting off the faceted angles of the carved quartz it’s made out of. One ear is slightly chipped and the underside of its belly and paws is charred to a smoky black color. He can’t make heads or tails of it and turns it over to see if there might be some explanation as to why Yilmaz had thought this important to give to him. When he can’t find an obvious answer he looks up at her in confusion.

“I found it in the wreckage. I’m told it’s a lucky talisman of sorts,” she says. “Considering it survived the fire I’d say it is.”

“I’m not really one for lucky charms, well maybe the cereal, but you know. It’s not really my thing.” He goes to give it back to her but she shakes her head.

“I’m meant to give it to you. You can keep it as a symbolism of luck or as an eccentric décor item for your home, but it’s yours now.”

“Who told you to give me this?” Dan turns the statue over again in his hands, looking to Yilmaz for an answer, but as she opens her mouth to speak a voice suddenly cuts her off.

“Ma’am? Please excuse the interruption, but I believe we should be going soon.”

The voice sounds familiar and Dan looks over Yilmaz’s shoulder to the corner of the ticket office building and sees a woman in a raincoat holding an umbrella over the froth of permed curls on her head he recognizes instantly.

“That’s…Lucy. The steward who was with Ashton that night,” he says and Yilmaz nods before calling out to Lucy that they were almost done here.

 “Yes, it’s Lucy,” she says turning back to Dan. “She believes she owes you and your friends a great debt for surviving the fire. She was hesitant to approach you, but when she heard I was helping you, that I was in fact your sire, she offered her service to me and in effect you. As the Court’s ex-steward she facilitated many services for them in administrative and logistical capacities. More specifically, she’s a wonder at finding the best modes of transportation a vampire needs to safely travel from one destination to another. You’ll find taking late-night flights on commercial airlines won’t work so well should the plane become delayed allowing the morning sun to pierce through your neighbor’s unshaded window or if a mortal passenger should decide to interrupt your daytime slumber only to find you as unresponsive as a corpse. It’s not safe by any means, but Lucy knows all the private flights, taxis and trains that the Court regularly used, information which, along with their wealth, is at your disposal as well. All you need to do is call her, schedule your appointments and she’ll take care of the rest. Think of her as your manager for all the necessities of nocturnal travel. She’ll even set up hotel accommodations in which the rooms are guaranteed to be protected from intrusive staff or sunlight seeping through the blinds.”

Dan stills for a moment, his finger tightly clenching the hippo in his hands until a strained squeal of hard crystal moments away from shattering warns him to loosen his grip. He places it gently on the bench and clenches his hands into fists over the folders in his lap instead. He had the Court’s money, their properties, their companies and now even their steward. Technically, he was the Court himself, just as powerful, influential and capable as all of them combined and the idea sends a nauseating chill through his body. All at once he recalls an uneasy dream he’d drifted into a few days ago where he and Phil had been vampire monarchs presiding over a vast grimdark forest from the foreboding hulk of a castle festooned with dagger point spires and fortified ramparts which would have looked right at home in Game of Thrones. The area of heavily forested land making up their domain in the dream was actually a London radically transformed by the ravages of nuclear destruction, the aftermath of which had plunged the city back into a strange dark age where technology had floundered, the skies were perpetually overcast and nature had reclaimed the streets in furious snarls of ivy and blooming overgrowths of moss- catalyzed in part by the leftover chemical stew of the Great War still rooted deep in the soil, continuing to break down and combine new compounds somehow able to enrich the roots of every plant that came into contact with it like a radioactive fertilizer capable of providing necessary sustenance in the sun’s absence so that instead of resembling the world of Mad Max’s poisoned salt flats, the ground had sprung up in a verdant exclamation point of defiance. It had seemed ironic to Dan in passing how mankind’s bid at self-destruction had only incited the earth’s primal instinct to survive. Over time, the once picturesque wildflowers adorning many English country gardens had shot up into vast, immense groves and the quaint rosebushes in Regent’s Park had morphed into virulent brambles packed with deadly thorns like spikes. Many plants had become overgrown to the point of puncturing straight through the pavement to the underground rail system beneath, stopping all train service permanently with a living wall of flowering vines impossible to tame. The tube hadn’t been the only thing to succumb to this wild renaissance. Big Ben had long been silenced by the colonies of weeds choking its gears and the once crystalline magnificence of the Shard had been shattered by the branches bursting through its foundations. No landmark or house was left unscathed by the encroaching influence of Mother Nature turned feral. Other than the ever flowing channel of the Thames, the city was unrecognizable as anything once resembling a sprawling metropolis full of tourists and commuters. Even the flat he and Phil had called home in a bygone era where they’d once been human had turned to dust under the drooping branches of the great willow tree which stood there now, though Dan had been known in half whispered stories by locals who didn’t understand the spot’s significance to visit once every year on his nightly rounds and place a hand at the base of the tree’s mountainous roots in a brief moment of silence before moving on. Even in the midst of devastation and the erosive passage of time, some memories died hard.

 All this information had occurred to Dan in a burst of insight like a passing afterthought his sleeping consciousness had no time to question as he otherwise would. Instead he had spectated from a distance, keenly observing his other self move through the castle, completely fixated on the clothing he wore- an all-black ensemble of leather, cloth and metal combining the utility of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic style with the medieval sensibilities of an elegant fur trimmed mantle thrown over one shoulder and articulated steel gauntlets on his hands decorated with emblematic motifs in intaglio; designs the dream had made him realize actually represented the royal heraldry of a lion and a bear. Dressed in this intimidating garb of knight-errant and gothic ruler, he had passed labyrinthine stone halls and darkened solars with misted over windows, a place well suited for visions of haunting specters where the only haunting vision to be found was his own minatory shadow following in his wake like a ribbon of oil. Wherever he went servants and stewards alike bowed and made a path, eyeing the long scabbard of the broadsword sheathed at his side with wary respect. In their eyes he was the vampire lord and king who had once made a place for himself centuries ago in the now defunct realm of the internet and who had now made another place for himself in this broken age marking a new era of the Court with him and Phil ruling side by side in uncontested might.

 He had continued watching himself move silently through the halls of the castle, treading up another winding staircase, past hanging glass lanterns filled with bioluminescent liquid to lend every corridor an unearthly blue glow, the only reliable source of illumination now save for candles in the absence of a functioning power grid to transmit the voltage required for bulbs and not enough sunlight to power solar cells for stored energy to use later. He’d moved through this eerie haze until he’d reached the antechamber leading to their private quarters and pushed the double doors wide to discover Phil sitting in an enormous gilt chair, dressed in the same ensemble of leather and fur. The only difference between them lay in the intricate high-peaked crown on Phil’s head, an argent circlet filled with glistening blue gems and white crystal shards. On turning his head slightly to adjust his field of vision like a panning camera angle, Dan could see his own crown resting on a small plinth to the left, an exact replica of Phil’s save for the inset of lustrous black crystals and dark purple gems adorning its base. On turning his head back, Dan’s immediate thought had been that Phil looked sensual, more so resplendent, the only words which had immediately come to mind to describe his attraction as something beyond simply handsome. It might have been the leather of the boots hugging the curve of his calves or the royal mantle accentuating the broad line of his shoulders to create an otherworldly yet stunning contrast to a waking reality where Phil favored comfortable shirts and pajama bottoms around the house in lieu of fur lined cloaks and black knee-high leather field boots like an aristocratic demon. His side swept fringe remained the only thing unchanged about his appearance, every strand falling in soft even layers across his forehead in a way which still inspired envy though Dan had long ago embraced his own hair’s natural waves. In the small pocket of silence between them, Phil had stared back at Dan with the same keen edge of fascination, one hand propped under his chin as he’d leaned against the padded arm rest of his chair, the piercing glint of his eyes made all the more arresting by the pall of shadows over his face, and once again Dan had been struck by how, even in a dream, Phil could instantly capture his attention without trying.

Neither had offered a word in greeting, but the twitch of a smirk on Phil’s face had contained a voluble message full of mischievous charm and the heat of promised pleasures Dan had been all too eager to enjoy. At once, he'd thrown off the scabbard and cloak to the side with a toss of his hand, listening to the unimportant clatter they’d made on hitting the floor as he’d swiftly crossed the room and approached Neo London’s second lord and vampire king.

Dan had watched himself lean down to meet the kiss Phil had expectantly inclined his head up to receive and even at a distance, far removed from the scene playing out before him, he had felt the warm rush of that simple touch spread from the base of his belly up to his chest like a burst of satisfied hunger. In the flickering glow of candlelight and bioluminescent lanterns, they’d improvised a languid choreography, following each other’s lead when one moved his head in a better position to deepen the kiss, carefully skirting the sharp edge of each other’s fangs between exchanges of contented murmurs and breathy sighs until Phil had leaned away to brush his lips against the front of Dan’s throat where he’d learned the flow of blood was sweetest. Dan had gently pushed him away with one gauntleted hand against Phil’s chest, restraining him only long enough to better situate himself in the great ornate chair for their mutual comfort. His knees had braced Phil’s thighs, bookending them on either side as he’d faced forward to sit entirely and unselfconsciously in Phil’s lap. No need to be embarrassed when they were equals here, sharing their desire for each other in private away from idle judgment and curious voyeurs. Not that anyone might have dared to interrupt or question them; not that anyone would have been foolish enough to try. Dan had pulled off his gauntlets and thrown them behind his shoulder to join his cloak and sword on the floor before kneading his hands through Phil’s hair, deliberately knocking the crown off his head to brush the feathery layers of his fringe into a ruffled mess of a quiff. Phil hadn’t protested the reckless massage, instead giving in to it with an easy smile and leaning forward again to insist on the gift of warm blood pulsing through Dan’s veins. This time Dan had obliged, lifting his chin up and closing his eyes with an anticipatory shiver for the imminent sting of fangs in his skin.

Over the busy crackle of the fireplace in the room another noise had intruded from outside, a steady muted thud like the sound of something monstrous flapping equally monstrous wings. It didn’t seem impossible that both flora and fauna had been affected by the lingering traces of chemicals in the soil. Perhaps it had only just been the wind or perhaps the sound had come from a mutated bat now as large as a car, but the two kings had ignored it, safe as they were behind barriers of stone and steel, intent only on the fervid heat of each other’s presence as Phil had finally drove his fangs into the tender skin of Dan’s throat. The smell of blood rose immediately and Dan, as the dreamer looking on, had ached for a taste of it; had yearned to bite Phil as much as he yearned to be bitten by him. The droning thuds from outside had grown louder, pounding in time to a heartbeat neither king possessed while Dan’s hunger had snapped and writhed like a snake, wanting more and more and more. In response, the dream had shifted to accommodate the intensity of his urge and now the cavernous room was filling up with blood, first pooling in a scarlet rill across the floor to quickly become a flood that in no time at all had lapped at Phil’s knees in frothing waves. Yet, still, neither of them reacted and Dan had watched as the blood had swirled up to their chests, then to their shoulders and over their heads before submerging his vision completely with an endless field of red. It had filled his nose and surged down his mouth, choking him in an instant and blacking out his vision so that he’d awoken with a strangled gasp in Phil’s bed, clawing at the empty air with the sweet ghostly aftertaste of blood still in his mouth.

Back in the quiet darkness of Phil’s room where the windows had been carefully blockaded with curtains and dense quilts against the sun, Dan had realized the muted thudding noise from the dream had followed him and after a moment of confused panic had quickly traced its source to Phil lying next to him, his pulse setting an even pace that had helped calm the feeling of woozy dread turning Dan’s stomach into knots. It hadn’t been clear whether the the dream was a premonition or merely his subconscious magnifying his deepest desires and fears into a surreal illusion, but he’d remained frozen in a tangle of bed sheets, half aroused and half mortified he’d found the dream so arousing to begin with.

“It’s just a dream,” Phil had murmured suddenly, his eyes heavy with sleep after startling awake when Dan had jostled the bed. It had been the middle of the afternoon, the time when Dan usually succumbed to his daytime slumber. Though he didn’t need to, Phil had begun to join him for a few hours of needed rest as they usually spent the majority of the evening wide awake to work on projects and videos together now that Dan was truly a night owl. If it had been an inconvenience to rearrange his internal clock according to Dan’s, Phil hadn’t complained except to remark how nice it was to have an excuse to make a late night snack of toast every day. Dan hadn’t told him the reason for why he’d woken up, but Phil’s own experience with unpleasant stress dreams had been enough for him to empathize.

 “Nothing’s happened,” Phil had murmured again, this time with a small wave of his hand for Dan to go back to sleep. “Everything’s fine. You’re okay.”

“Am I really?” Dan had muttered in a low aside to himself, but Phil had heard and with a rumbling sigh promptly rolled over to haul Dan by the collar of his shirt back down into the warm bundle of sheets before he had a chance to expand that thought into a beleaguering introspection likely to last the entire afternoon.

 It would have been nice if their victory over the Court had made things easier, like how most endings to stories were supposed to be, but life hardly followed the rules set in fiction and as George had said to him before, despite his successes and new self-gained confidence, the answers didn’t come any easier. He couldn’t deny the small fantasy of shared power the dream alluded to was tempting, nearly as tempting as the ‘perfected’ image of himself Makhai had once teased him with. In some ways, chasing after the things he wanted to do and the person he wanted to be would always have an elusive quality about it he would never stop yearning for even as an immortal- perfection itself being a constantly shifting state of being subject to the caprices of society and his own self-esteem, but he wondered if the dream had meant to warn him that he might chase it down to become everything he had once despised the Court for being; if he might in fact become powerful to the point of power hungry and vicious, in effect fulfilling their worst expectations of him without ever meaning to. Yilmaz’s gift brings the dream right back to the fore of his thoughts, making him question himself all over again as he looks at the folders in his hands with growing alarm.

“Something wrong,” Yilmaz asks when she notices the look on his face.

“Yeah. No. Look-” He shakes his head. “I’m glad they’re gone. That it’s over, but Eris mentioned there were other Courts around the world who had their eyes on claiming the seat of power here in London- to seize all their influence and wealth for themselves. This just puts a massive target on my head for them to come after me and I don’t need or want that kind of trouble.” He pauses and corrects himself. “I don’t want to be them.”

Yilmaz smiles. “Daniel, can you tell me where you are right now?”

“Sorry?”

“I said, can you tell me where you are right now?”

Dan frowns. He has no idea where she’s going with this. The last time she’d gone off on a tangent he’d walked out of a flower shop with a hunger for a blood and a new set of fangs. She’d already surprised him with another life altering change tonight, he can’t imagine she has another one hidden up her sleeve and when she continues to smile at him enigmatically, waiting for an answer, he sighs and decides to play along.

“Right. I’m in Newbury station waiting for the train to London.”

“Why?”

“I-because I want to go home, why else?”

“Why indeed,” she says. “It’s the universal question, isn’t it? One most often answered by what a person wants the most. We make of the world and our lives what we want to make of it; what we are willing to see or concede. You’re here because you want to be and you will soon leave because it’s what you want to do. We may think we’re at the mercy of forces and people we may sometimes never see, but it’s not always so. Certain elements may not make it easy to be as one wishes to be in a world full of imposing restrictions and prejudices, including those which are self-imposed or inflicted by things beyond our control, but choice remains a powerful imperative for the shape one’s life takes in fighting against opposition or giving into it. When speaking about the Court, you must understand they were never born corrupted. They allowed themselves to become what they became and as long as you decide you don’t want to live in their image, as long as you decide you alone are the one who decides what is most comfortable, sensible and convenient for _you_ , then, you never will. Your life is your own. Make of it what you please.”

 _Convenient coming from someone who decided to take my life that night and give me a new one without so much as a ‘by your leave_ ,’ he thinks but doesn’t say it aloud. The point was moot by now anyway and as Yilmaz had said, though she was his sire, he’d already made the choice not to follow in her footsteps.

“Yeah, I get the general idea behind self-actualization and locus of control, but I’m immortal not infallible,” he says. “I practically writhe around on the floor thinking up ideas for videos and how to present them- all that stuff about appropriate tone, good approach, honest self-expression; then finding a balance between what I want to do and what people want to see and all the why’s and how’s that go along with the act of creating anything and not having to feel as if I need to prove myself every time I try something different -there’s so many ways to fuck it up and get it wrong. There’s so much to think about, too much room for error. Then you go and hand me this-”

He trails off and shakes his head. “This is my life and if I don’t manage this next phase of it well, if I don’t utilize everything I’ve been given the right way or if I can’t defend myself properly or I become too empowered by what I have to become someone unrecognizable even to myself, I’ll fuck it up right at the point when it matters most. And what if I fuck it up past the point where I can remedy it?”

“What are you asking me for, when you’ve already answered your own question?”

Dan pauses, caught off guard. “Sorry-what now?”

Behind them, Lucy makes an imperceptible movement with the umbrella in her hand. To anyone else it might have appeared like a casual shift of posture, but Yilmaz interprets it for the restive display of nerves it actually is and she raises a hand to Lucy in a signal for patience.

“Daniel, not to be ‘lame’ as the kids say, but your entire life story has proven to be a working example of you consistently answering your own questions or creating answers where no other suitable ones exist,” Yilmaz says. “I’ve found humans to be incredibly varied creatures. They each have their own heuristic process for how they relate to the world and to themselves. No two humans will ever cope or learn in exactly the same ways. Each of them possesses their own context of experience to inform their actions and thoughts for better or for worse, but all journeys of self-awareness and discovery are universally achieved through relentless questioning- through asking the _right_ questions as you’ve done tonight. As long as you continue to do that- rather, as long as you don’t turn the questions into crippling doubt and as long as you attempt to act on the things which matter, then nothing else really matters.”

“I mean, that’s very ‘Zen’ and wholesome and all, but that doesn’t solve everything,” Dan says.

“I never said it would. There is no be all end all solution. One simply finds what works and what doesn’t. Or to paraphrase Voltaire, ‘we’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good; we do the best we know.’ That is all. You’re worried about what it means to have so much power at your disposal and how to embrace it without losing yourself or the people you love. After all, power implies boundless freedom to finally be as you really are, to accomplish the things you already have a mind to do, and when faced with such limitless opportunity, one can do anything, be anything, even the worst of everything they fear. Who you are and what you think will constantly evolve in the face of such freedom. Such is the way of the world. Nothing is certain. Nothing is static. Neither are you. All solutions and answers are temporary, apt to change in an instant for better answers and better solutions. You’ve given into the flow of such change before; you’ve moved on from situations and people in the past to shed a more informed lens of wisdom on your future actions, yet inevitably you will ‘fuck up’ certain things along the way regardless and inevitably as well, you will say things you’ll later come to regret, but you have the critical foresight to recognize your mistakes and you have the empathy necessary to lend insight to all the many ways you reflect on and relate to others, including yourself. In that sense, as long as you don’t decide those qualities are worthless, as long as you opt for discretion over reckless malice, whatever ‘fuck up’s’ you make will hardly be detrimental. Have patience for the process and for yourself. Life is longer than you think and you have all the time in the world to figure it out, with or without immortality at your disposal, but perhaps you already knew that.”

 She pauses to allow him time to respond, but when he says nothing to admit or deny her suggestion as true she continues. “In either case, whatever you decide to do next is entirely up to you, but allow your accomplishments to empower you, and if you need further proof of the latent strength you already possess, you need look no further than the evidence of everything you’ve managed to achieve and the name you’ve made for yourself, singularly and together. That should grant you all the answers you require.”

The ring on her hand glints in the refracted glow of the lights overhead and she looks at it in a moment of prolonged silence with a musing smile. “This is an old thing,” she says. “Not quite as old as me, but close. In the hands of a stranger this heirloom is merely a trinket of carved silver, something to be pawned off for a handsome bit of cash or to be forgotten in a thrift shop as a worthless curiosity, but it holds importance for me and thus my belief infuses it with meaning. Belief is everything, Daniel, whether you believe in God or only yourself, belief can change a great many things in this world. It creates opportunities, engenders hope and draws people together that otherwise might never have met at all.”

At the last part she looks back up at him meaningfully. “Despite my affinity for the stories and legends of ancient times, I have never believed in deities though I was once worshipped like one. I am no goddess or paragon of might no matter my reputation or how many rumors are spread about me. I hold no ancient knowledge of the universe and I may even be an old fraud as some have called me in whispers behind my back, but I do know this for certain: something that two people who are in love create together against impossible odds, can hold them together...forever. Through adversity and conflict, through advances in technology and science, time and again I’ve found it is such examples of empathy and that oft maligned, misunderstood and overlooked idea of love in its truest, blissful form which provides the best answers of all. If you do not believe in the idea of magic, God, talismans or luck, then believe in that.”

As soon as she says it Dan’s mind conjures up a memory of Phil looking at him steadily through a haze of smoke and fire and saying, “I trust you”- Words that in an instant had carried stronger inflections of love and belief more powerful and ardent than any conflagration. Phil was no servile lackey like Ashton and Fergus had been, blindly pledging their loyalty out of fear, obligation and aggrandized ego. Phil was an example of the type of love Yilmaz had advocated for, something which consistently drew out the best in him, which encouraged him to flourish and succeed at the very point where doubt intruded to convince him otherwise. Phil was just a human, one out of many as Aeacus had once dismissively pointed out and though it was true, like Yilmaz’s example of her ring, all the years spent building reciprocal currents of trust and belief in each other had made Phil’s presence and his words inhabit a place of unrivaled significance in Dan’s mind not even the world’s premier scientists or philosophers could ever replace. Whatever might change in the future, whoever he might go on to be, and however he might choose to answer all the diverse, conflicting array of questions that would continue to surface with the passing years, he derives a certain sense of calm at the idea of having the opportunity to answer those questions with the best of his ability and to live his life alongside someone like Phil who would never fail to augment those abilities into something better than he’d first imagined himself capable of.  
 Belief in himself, belief in Phil, belief in all the many things they’d achieved against impossible odds– yes, in looking for what to base his next decisions on that was as good a place as any to start.

The far off blast of a horn startles Dan from his pensive silence and he glances up towards the bending curve of the tracks on the horizon where the sharp glare of an approaching train’s headlight appears in the darkness like a small sun.

Yilmaz nods and snaps the briefcase shut. “That’s you then and that’s my ‘lame lecture’ for the night concluded as well. However, if you’re still concerned about being harassed by other Courts looking for a power struggle, you should know one of the nice things about my ‘notorious reputation’ is that at the mention of my name people tend to tread very carefully. As my new blood, they will lend you the same deference and caution they give to me. No one will challenge you and if they do…well.” Her smile broadens into a stretched, disturbing grin, her fangs displayed to the gum line and in that brief eloquent gesture Dan sees a glimpse of the wild deity attributed to her so called notorious reputation. The grin lapses back to its previous serene smile and the fangs disappear, much to Dan’s relief. “Yet, I imagine you’ll do a fine job of defending yourself and your own well enough without my help,” she says.

With that, Yilmaz stands up, intent on leaving and Dan reflexively jumps to his feet, grabbing for the folders before they can slide from his lap to the floor as he throws up a hand to stop her. “Wait, hold on- I mean, are you leaving for good or…?”

“I’m surprised you felt the need to ask, but no. I’ll be around. Should you decide you need me after all-” She produces a small card from her sleeve with the deft alacrity of a magic trick and hands it to him. “These are Lucy’s contact numbers, along with addresses of places I oftentimes stay when I’m in the city. Call her or pay a visit to these locations and I’ll be informed. If you decide never to call on me then consider me gone. I won’t interfere in your life any more than I already have, if that’s any consolation to you at this point.”

Dan takes the card without comment and carefully tucks it under the secure clamp of a paper clip holding together the sheaf of papers in one of the many folders in his arms.

“So…” He clears his throat. “What are you going to do now?”

“Many things,” Yilmaz says and the spiced smell of incense and licorice continues to mill about her like a fragrant breeze. “I might visit the other Courts, perhaps give them a working incentive to leave you alone. I might also visit old friends and old haunts; enjoy all the sights and sounds London has to offer. Eternity has endless possibilities after all.”

“Well, just don’t visit any flower shops again.”

Yilmaz laughs. “Duly noted.”

“Speaking of- one last question.” Dan pauses, awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “What exactly is it with the hibiscus flowers anyway?”

Yilmaz shrugs. “Nothing. I just like them. Not everything has to have a profound symbolism for it to have meaning, but I think you understand that better than most.”

The train rumbles around the bending curve of the track, slowing speed as it nears the station and the stale odor of boredom coming off from the passenger waiting at the platform segues into a scent Dan’s senses interpret as overwhelming relief.

“Goodbye, Daniel,” Yilmaz says. “Remember to keep yourself centered and focused on the positive changes ahead. Even if the world can be a gallows joke at times, not everything about you has to be as well.”

“Well, maybe,” he replies with a shrug. “But sometimes it helps not to take things too seriously, just to keep me grounded.”

“As long as it grounds you and doesn’t diminish you. It’s easy to lose yourself in the joke and become the bad parody instead, but I think that’s something else you also understand very well.” She raises a hand to him and waves. As soon as she does, a blast of wind from the train’s rushing approach makes Dan turn his head to watch it glide into the station with a squeal of brakes and grinding metal.

“Oh yes, and say hello to ‘Kyle’ for me.”

Yilmaz’s voice speaks up from beside him in a low amused tone and when he swivels his head back in confusion to ask, “who’s Kyle?” he’s promptly met with the empty space where she had once stood.

He does a double take, looking back and forth between each end of the platform, but Yilmaz and Lucy are gone, leaving him alone to clutch the folders of his unlikely inheritance close to his chest, along with one odd hippo statue he thinks he might give to Phil once he arrives home. The doors to the train immediately slide open when it stops and he snaps back to himself, quickly stooping down to stuff the folders into his suitcase before he accidentally dropped or misplaced them. On a quick afterthought he stuffs the hippo statue in as well, shoving it under a pile of socks to cushion it against any impacts should the suitcase bang into something as he towed it behind him. He goes through the motions in a dazed stupor, still so utterly gobsmacked by his encounter with Yilmaz that upon entering the train he finds himself in the wrong carriage altogether. When he finally notices, he advances down the aisle towards the connecting door between compartments and spends a full minute trying to wrestle it open before an attendant walks up and calmly suggests for him to maybe turn the handle instead. With a muttered word of thanks and an embarrassed flush creeping up his jaw he quickly zips through the door and makes a beeline towards his seat.

There are only a few people sharing the carriage with him and of those many are sleeping or engrossed in the phones and books in their hands. No one pays him any mind and he’s grateful for the reprieve from public recognition, especially now when his mind is still racing to process what had just occurred. After shoving his suitcase into the overhead luggage rack he plops himself down into his seat and leans against the backrest with a sigh. After a minute he turns his head to stare out the window past the shiny drops of rain speckling the glass into the soft nighttime darkness melding with the shadows of the trees and houses dotting the horizon. In the absence of Phil to distract him with conversation and no interest in listening to music right now, watching the scenery helps to divert the scattered path of his thoughts and entice them back into focusing on the present moment when in a few more minutes he would leave Berkshire for the place he would always consider his true home.

It’s funny to him how, from a distance, as an observer and no longer a resident of his old hometown, everything seems calmer, less involved and more benign than when he used to live here. At that time he’d been frustrated by the dull confines of a town seemingly too small and overbearing to accommodate his dreams. Apart from the scenic hills and the music festival there hadn’t been much to offer here and he’d strained for the chance to leave and start over somewhere new, with a better promise for his future surrounded by better friends. Now, as the train begins to pull away from the station to ferry him on into a future filled with incredible opportunities and a fortune that had quite literally fallen into his lap, he wonders when he might be back here again and how much things might have changed when he did. There’s not much tethering him to this place other than family and wisps of nostalgia for moments which hadn’t been entirely bad. He doesn’t regret leaving and he doesn’t regret the choices which had taken him to a moment in time where he lived in a flat in a city little more than eight times the size of Wokingham, alongside a person who daily made him happier than he’d ever been in his life. Yet, an indefinable weight pulls at his chest, a searing pang of anxious uncertainty at leaving the familiar behind and proceeding on into the unknown to create a life for himself far different and stranger than he ever imagined it might be when he was just a boy trailing through the halls of the old Forest School, wondering about the future and all the things he wanted to do once he could leave.

Despite his list of successes and despite being a creature long feared in ancient myths with formidable power surging though his bones, he’s nervous about what the next hours might bring, unsure if he might mess things up at the very moment when it mattered most just as he’d confessed to Yilmaz. He wouldn’t be able to reverse his decision once he started, just as he couldn’t reverse the ‘gift’ of immortality he’d been given, nor stop the train’s forward momentum towards London flat where Phil was patiently waiting for him to return. Things had already been set in motion and now it was up to him to follow through to its conclusion, whatever that might be. Besides, he’d long concluded that looking back was a good way to become lost in the past and never move at all. He’d outgrown the humdrum streets of his old hometown years ago and he wasn’t that dreaming boy looking for a way out anymore. He’d found a new home, accomplished his old dreams and nurtured new ones in their wake that with time and a small nudge of luck and a greater shove of effort he hoped to realize as well in the months and years to come. This part of his life had come to a close. It was time to move on. There was no use moaning over things he couldn’t possibly foresee or lose himself in a melancholic mood over old hurts and bad memories. He had to face the unknown, deal with the changes as they came and initiate more changes where necessary to make his life the best he possibly could; to ensure a future where he was happy, content and proud of himself, if only for the effort of trying.

 _There I go again, with that ‘pooh bear sentimentality,_ ’ he thinks with a wry smile remembering Eris’ words. _But why the hell not? This is who I am. This is me. I care too much,  I talk to myself, I mumble and I’m a mess in ways both figurative and literal, but it’s me. Trying to cope with myself, human nature and the question of universal existence with whatever I have, however I can- sentimentality, dry wit, gallows humor and all. Yilmaz was right. It’s my life and as long as I have a say in it I’ll decide how much that changes, I’ll decide who I become or where I go from here. Me and Phil both. Together._

As the shadowed blurs of the landscape flits by the window he settles into this idea and finally closes his eyes to rest and listen to the trundling sway of the carriage and the soft patter of rainfall against the glass. These sounds follow him down into a restful sleep devoid of dreams where he momentarily escapes the grumbled undercurrent of worried thoughts he can’t control, save from pushing them down into his subconscious before they had a chance to make his brain convince himself to lose his nerve. He’d need every ounce of it tonight. They both would, but as he swirls down deeper into a relaxing void his last conscious thought is an incoherent mumble of sound better translated as a feeling of steadfast anticipation, one without a hint of fear or hesitation behind it. Then it’s gone, replaced by a tide of soothing silence that surrounds and warms him like a protective cloak all the way to London.

 

❧

 

He awakens later to the sound of people bustling about the carriage, reaching for luggage and engaging in small talk as they head down the aisle towards the exit to leave. One man with his headphones resting away from his ears trudges past, allowing the earsplitting blast of his music to fill the air around him. The volume is turned up so loud the hammering thud of the bass distorts the sound from any recognizable genre into a dissonant crush of static making Dan wonder how the man hasn’t ruptured his own eardrums yet. On turning his head back to the window, he notices the scenery outside has changed to the towering arches of iron and glass making up Paddington station. In seemingly no time at all he’s arrived back in London. Other than inadvertently speeding up time, his brief nap has also left him feeling well rested and remarkably clear headed. If this were a competition he thinks it might easily win top place against the epic slumber Phil had told him about.

 He stretches his arms above his head and gives voice to a jaw cracking yawn before remembering the fangs in his mouth now fully on display for all to see. His mouth snaps shut again so fast his teeth click together with an audible snap louder than the man’s blaring music, but thankfully, no one seems to notice, intent as they are on heading out of the train on into the city towards their myriad destinations.

Dan swiftly gets to his feet and after retrieving his suitcase he follows the small exodus of passengers in front of him, intent on reaching his own destination now only a short cab ride away. The sounds of pulsing heartbeats momentarily swells like a wave to engulf him as soon as he steps off the train into the larger arena of the platform full of milling commuters, but then just as quickly the systolic orchestra recedes as his focused rush on arriving home cancels out every noise around him to a barely audible mumble. Outside the station he finds a queue of cars waiting at the taxi rank and choosing one at random, he quickly darts inside and gives his address to the indifferent looking driver who pulls away without a word or reaction except a curt nod Dan thinks might have actually been a reflexive twitch of his head. The musty stockroom smell from before is stronger here inside the car, giving Dan a good indication of exactly what the driver thought of his late night shift and the fares he was meant to pick up. It’s fine however. Dan thinks they’re evenly matched in having zero interest for the tedious niceties of small talk. As the bright glare of city lights pours through his window he’s occupied only with counting the minutes off in his head and reading every familiar street name on the signs flitting past, bringing him that much closer to home.

At another time in another frame of mind he might recognize the alley where he’d saved Phil from Ashton or the block of terraced houses where he had nearly made a snack out of a fox on his first day as a vampire and had shortly thereafter met Teague. He might also note the small parks he had attempted small runs through with Phil when he was still human or the bakeries he’d once idled in for coffee and pistachio muffins or any of the otherwise mundane sights of the city turned nostalgic and meaningful over the years they’d spent living here because of the many good impressions left behind. The entire city was a compendium of memories in motion, second only to those he and Phil had created in Manchester where half of his heart would always remain. Now however, as he rolls down the window a crack to let the odorless cold breeze outside clear his head of the driver’s stuffy ennui, he only has eyes for the present moment, itself absent of any meaning or memories save for the endless potential each second contained for new memories to be made. It’s a relief to let his mind drift on the fresh stream of wind rustling his hair. It’s undemanding and unimportant- simplicity personified  and he finds refuge there in the brisk chill of each errant breeze as it clears away the usual churning mix of philosophical questions and poetic metaphors that would otherwise populate his head to bursting if he let it. To test his resolve, the chronic itch of anxious discomfort and existential dread prods at him from under the surface of his subconscious like a ghost he could never fully dispel, but for once it’s a manageable annoyance that quickly recedes in the larger thrill of excitement that bolts through his head as the familiar promenade of stores and restaurants leading up to the flat appears on either side of him in the windows.

The cab pauses behind the idling hulk of a red bus blocking half the road to allow passengers on and off. It’ll move soon, but with the flat now only a quick walking distance away, Dan makes the decision to leave right then and there. He tells the driver as much who merely shrugs and announces the owed fare in a robotic monotone. Dan promptly hands over the money and doesn’t wait for the change. Without waiting to hear the driver respond to his parting remark to have a good night and not expecting one anyway, he slips out of the car with his suitcase rattling behind him and begins to make his way past shuttered shop windows towards home. Pedestrians flit by in his periphery, trailing the sound of their heartbeats in their wake, but Dan pushes them all aside and hones in on Phil’s instead. Without George’s instruction it would have been difficult to pick out the sound of Phil’s pulse from the percussive riot of heartbeats belonging to the anonymous crowd of humans all filling the cars, houses and restaurants on their block, but he’d soon come to learn that no two heartbeats ever sounded the same. He wasn’t sure if he’d call it a biorhythmic signature as George had, even less sure that he believed in such a thing despite being an unbelievable creature himself, but he was certain that each person’s pulse contained unique quirks of tics and beats that never sounded exactly the same even if to a cardiologist with a stethoscope they might. Phil’s is a lively, calming tempo, a perfect mimicry of the quiet drizzle of rain falling around him. It’s unobtrusive and pleasant, much like Phil himself. Dan allows it to blindly guide him down the pavement until he finds himself at last in front of the door to their building. Fishing out the keys from his pocket he unlocks it and steps inside to a familiar fragrant aroma that’s sweet, indulgent and unmistakably Phil.

 The level mellow pulse quickens at once as Phil hears Dan close the door behind him. The fragrant aroma, the not-smell of love Dan had come to associate with Phil long ago, bids him to follow it up the stairs right to the door of their flat. It’s unlocked as Dan had already expected it might be and after toeing off his trainers he opens it to a sea of cardboard boxes and sheets of bubble wrap littering every bare inch of space on the floor. They’d made good progress over the past few months in preparing for the impending move to their new flat, but Dan had discovered five years spent in one place accumulating memories and miscellaneous items to go along with them meant an exhaustible amount of possessions to sort through to determine which were dispensable and which were not. He’d thought with a little pragmatism and effort they could easily minimize their belongings to only the bare essentials, purchasing new things as they went along, but every subsequent discovery of cherished novelties, important documents, favorite pieces of clothing and memorable gifts from subscribers and friends alike, meant their ‘to keep’ pile now towered over those designated for charity and the trash. At this rate, on the day they were meant to vacate the premises for good, they’d still have a mound of boxes left to haul with them. In turn, calling for more time spent unpacking and rearranging it all over again. The very thought makes him want to take up the minimalist lifestyle more than ever before, but he briefly pushes the idea aside as he wades through more cardboard barriers to the lounge where he finds Phil stood in the middle of the room holding up two shirts on either side of him with a studious look on his face, clearly caught between keeping one and ditching the other.

“Hey,” Dan says quietly. He already knows the greeting is redundant, merely a way to verbally acknowledge their mutual awareness of each other’s presence long before they’d seen each other in person.

“Hey,” Phil returns with a smile. His tone is casual and serene, but his pulse continues its lively canter and the not-smell of love gently rises in the room. “What do you reckon? I’ve been having trouble deciding.

He proffers the shirts for Dan’s opinion- a sky blue hoodie covered in white flecks like bobble fluff and a darker colored tee with prints of ethereal floating jellyfish on the front and back.

“All your ugly clothes you mean. You should let me choose something for you for a change. I’d buy a new set of outfits that would actually look decent on you.” Dan pushes his way further into the room past the rainbow spectrum of their dining chairs filled with stacks of more boxes and bubble wrap as Phil laughs.

“Decent? You’re one to talk with your leather shirt.”

“Look, that was an ironic purchase, alright?”

“Whatever you say. But, seriously.” Phil waggles the shirts like a set of unbalanced scales. “Which one? I have so many left to go through and I’d like to get rid of at least half this stuff without having to feel like I’m giving away my own children.”

Dan shrugs. “Depends on how much you like them.”

“My children?”

“No, the shirts you dork.”

“Oh, Right.” Phil gives a chortling laugh, the tip of his tongue sticking out between his teeth as it usually did when he found something unexpectedly amusing and Dan thinks looking at him right then, so full of childish glee at his own accidental joke, feels like being socked in the face with love, much stronger and more devastating than George’s or Makhai’s blows combined; infinitely more welcoming and more profound.

“I like them both,” Phil goes on to say when he recovers. “But do I really need them is the question.”

“Technically, we don’t need any of it. We could ditch every single thing in this room tonight and buy all new stuff.”

 “Sure. Right away,” Phil says glibly, but when Dan continues to stare at him without taking back the suggestion as a joke, he drops the shirts onto the table and raises his eyebrows. “What’s gotten into you? So impulsive all of a sudden. Besides we can’t just ditch all of it- what about sentimental value?”

“You’re sentimentally attached to a bobbled hoodie and a jellyfish shirt?”

Phil casually waves away the question. “I’m not talking about the clothing anymore. I mean all the rest of it. We kind of already had this discussion about the sofa when we both agreed to bring it with us, not exactly because we couldn’t afford to buy another better one. I was even thinking about taking pictures of the empty rooms afterwards to remember all the good memories that happened here.”

Dan repeats Phil’s last words back in a saccharinely sweet and high pitched tone of voice, putting on an exaggerated face of disgust at the idea, though he’s secretly tempted to do the same.

“Well, I don’t care. I’m doing it anyway.” Phil smiles, completely unaffected by Dan’s obvious performance, recognizing it for the lighthearted jab it really was, especially when he knew they both were equally and unapologetically moved by sincere gestures of affection, whether it was a heartstring tugging scene in a movie or reminiscing over old photos full of powerfully evocative, warm memories.

Dan gives up the act instantly as he winds his way through the forest of boxes and clothes on the floor and sits down squarely in his favorite crease of their long lived sofa, trying to think of how best to approach the subject of their incredible windfall.  
“You know…I’ve been thinking,” he begins slowly. “Forget the duplex. Let’s go somewhere else. That forever place we always talk about? Let’s get it. Now. Right now.”

Phil stares at him and the amused smirk of his mouth gradually levels out to a frown.  
“Dan, seriously, what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I mean it.”

“We can’t just- It’s not-” Phil moves his hands in great arcs through the air, trying to find the right words through his muddled exasperation and falling short before finally bursting out, “We’ve been through this-we’re not ready for a move like that yet. You’re talking about a long term investment of responsibility and money.”

“Money which we have.”

“Money which we’re meant to budget wisely,” Phil adds with a stern dip to his voice. “We’ve already signed the lease and I don’t think we have a break clause. We’d be on the hook for the rent without ever having moved in!”

“So we can afford to pay it.”

“You’re not listening to me! Even if we can, we don’t have anywhere to go! There’s no time to look-”

“We have plenty of time.”

Phil goes deadly silent. To someone else looking on at a first glance he might appear calm, but Dan knows better. The severe expression on his face isn’t quite what Dan would call anger, anger being a heated emotion he usually equated with violent gestures and vicious words where Phil’s manner is coldly aloof, but it’s nevertheless much more foreboding and effective than anger at communicating his annoyance. It’s a rare thundercloud in Phil’s usual cheery repertoire of moods and its appearance never fails to send a small chill down the back of Dan’s neck. He thinks even the Court might have immediately backed down under the withering force of that stare, perhaps even going so far as to ask for Phil’s pardon on bended knee. He’s nearly ready to do the same, but he fights the urge and persists, wanting to surprise Phil and watch his face go from stated displeasure to shocked delight.

“I’m not making fun of you and I’m not trying to wind you up.” Dan keeps his tone sotto and cajoling. “I’m telling you- we have the time and we have the money. Maybe we can stay at the new place for a bit until we figure out somewhere better suited for us to live, something that’s  exactly everything we’ve always dreamed for it to be, but we don’t have to wait anymore. We can do it right now. Especially after I explain why, but I- I think you should sit down first actually.”

For a moment he’s not sure Phil might be willing to cooperate, but the fragrant smell in the air, though considerably lessened, hasn’t disappeared and after another tense second of silence, Phil does as suggested and takes a seat at his usual corner of the sofa next to Dan. The expression on his face hasn’t changed a dot however and Dan decides to act quickly before testing Phil’s patience any further.

 He unzips his suitcase and reaches for the packet of folders inside. “I think it’s better if you take your time and read this first,” he says. “Read all of it.” He hands the folders over to Phil who merely looks at him, uncomprehendingly.

“Dan…”

“No, read it first. Then we can talk.”

Resigned to play along, Phil takes the folders in hand and opens one to read the papers inside. At first his face retains its poker faced severity, but as he follows each line of text down the page his eyes progressively become wider and wider. Once he skims through all the pages in the first folder, he moves to the next and then the next and the next in quick succession, his hands trembling a bit more with every dossier of financial information he reads. Dan’s smile grows into a full-fledged grin as Phil takes on a shell shocked look of bewilderment and when Phil looks back at him, his mouth working soundlessly to say something only to end up giving a squeaky gasp, he bursts out laughing in a nervous reflex of delight.

“Dan, this is-I can’t believe it,” Phil manages to say at last. “I mean, you have-you’re-”

“No. _We have_.” Dan corrects him gently. “All of this. All of it is ours.”

“But- how?”

“I just visit a solicitor and have everything transferred into our joint names.”

“You know what I mean.” Phil looks exasperated again, but it’s tempered by the ecstatic smile on his face. “This is incredible! It’s like every Vegas jackpot rolled into one. How did this happen?”

Dan begins to explain everything about his encounter with Yilmaz and Phil dutifully listens to every detail, round-eyed and silent. He doesn’t interrupt and Dan takes care not to omit anything except for his brief moment of brooding over the strange dream in which he and Phil had been vampire overlords. At the mention of the pink quartz hippo Phil eyes go wider still when Dan pulls it out of the suitcase and hands it to him.

“I can’t believe it survived all that.” Phil carefully turns it over to study its slightly charred belly and paws then holds it up to the light so that a refracted ethereal pink glow falls over his face.

Dan shrugs. “Maybe it really is lucky.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“No, but you do, so who cares?” Dan draws his feet up onto the coffee table, pretending not to notice the way Phil slowly lowers the statue to stare in warm reverence at him instead. “What I don’t understand is why she gave it to me or who said for her to.”

“Well, maybe she gave it to you to indirectly give it to me,” Phil says. He suddenly begins to toy with the hippo statue in a restless offhand way and this time the pink glow suffusing his face is more from the warm rush of blood filling his cheeks.

“Why do you say that?” Dan frowns.

Phil looks suddenly, profoundly embarrassed and he nearly drops the statue onto the floor. “Er-because I might have met her in the manor that night, right after I found this in the basement, and I might have given her an alias instead of my real name. Though, she probably figured out who I was well before I said anything.”

“No wonder she mentioned for me to say hi to ‘Kyle,’” Dan says and the embarrassed flush on Phil’s cheeks swirls a deeper shade of red. “And you might have planned on mentioning all this _when?_ ”

“I thought maybe after the move. You know, when we were settled in and had time to distance ourselves from everything that happened to be able to talk about it more comfortably.”

Dan nods. “Yeah, can’t argue with you when I feel the same way,” he says. “There’s still so much I haven’t told you about that night too, but I’d rather focus on us than the past right now.”

Phil glances back down at the folders containing their new vast fortune. “What now then?”

“Anything,” Dan says. “Literally anything.”

“So we could build a house with an actual owl slide for a roof?”

“I mean, sure. Whatever. Throw in a glass covered koi pond in the floor if you want.”

A dreamy contented look settles over Phil’s face and Dan can only imagine the things running through his mind right now, every thought probably brimming with visions of contractors installing slides in place of stairs, colorful feature walls framed by placements of lush ferns, and a private dog park in the backyard to indulge their small army of corgis and shibes, of which Cavall would hold prominence. Dan has his own ideas to add to Phil’s roster of innovative remodels, but with some effort he brings his thoughts back to the present and the gallery of boxes surrounding them. Phil was right. They didn’t have time to look for the perfect forever place, not when a search like that demanded judicious care and attention. They only had a month left on their current lease to stay here and they were already set to move to the new duplex. His old days as a student spent cramming for exams under a time crush at the last minute had already taught him doing most things in a hurry when he was hardly prepared didn’t always go over so well and finding the perfect place they could both truly call home, a place they owned and could alter as they pleased without landlords or tenancy restrictions to tell them no, was one goal he didn’t want to rush. Phil picks up on his train of thought effortlessly as he mirrors Dan’s sideward glance at the boxes on the floor and sighs.

“Guess we can’t do anything else except move to the new place in the meantime while we look for the home we both really want,” he says. “One upside is that we don’t have to take everything with us. We could leave most of it in storage and just take the most important stuff with us.”

“Knowing you, that means scented candles, DVDs and board games.”

“Well, what could be more important than that?” Phil grins as he sets the hippo statue down on the coffee table next to one of said scented candles.

“I could think of a few things.”

“Oh what, your Guild Wars shrine and collection of black shirts you mean,” Phil deadpans, breaking off into a laugh when Dan leans over to shove his arm. The vaguely sweet and woody fragrance of Phil’s emotions swells in time to his heartbeat, filling the room with the particular attar of Phil’s love and delight. It’s chased by another scent however, a denser electric tinge of heat like the palpable weight lingering in the air before a thunderstorm or the tense anticipation before a monumental change was due to occur. Dan’s certain if Phil were able to, he might pick up the same scent coming off of him as well.

 _In a few more hours he will_ , Dan thinks.

It was just as well they put aside all their renovation and moving plans for another time, not when they’d both need each other’s full attention tonight.

“You eat well today?” Dan asks and Phil’s head whips around, momentarily confused by the abrupt question before picking up on the reason behind it. They’d already discussed the topic weeks in advance and Dan had spent the better part of every evening leading up to this one buying Phil his favorite food, almost stuffing the fridge to maximum capacity until there’d nearly been no space left to squeeze in his necessary containers of blood. In short order the kitchen had filled with packets of marshmallows and Haribo; boxes of Dan’s cereal now officially Phil’s along with every flavor of popcorn Phil fancied. Dan had cooked dinners of quinoa, Mexican, and spaghetti bolognese; he’d ordered takeaways of pizzas and tacos and treated Phil to restaurants featuring vibrant presentations of sushi and extraordinarily crafted desserts. It all seemed like the last hurrah of guilty pleasures someone might enjoy before deciding to embark on a serious diet and in a way Dan had thought that was exactly what it was, albeit a permanent diet without the luxury of ‘cheat days’ in between. On top of indulging Phil’s sweet tooth, he’d even urged Phil to enjoy afternoon outings with friends- to go with Wirrow on strolls through the park to walk Cavall and buy ice cream or meet up with old friends from New York to enjoy an escape the room game and go to long anticipated museum exhibits despite the stringent daytime hours barring Dan from tagging along. Between these uncommonly frequent social excursions, well before Dan had left on his brief family holiday, Phil had visited with his own family again, picking up where they had last left off when he’d been forced to leave on a train back to London in a hurry. They’d spent many days together and Phil had returned with a camera roll full of pictures and videos and a string more of stories to tell, all of which Dan had listened to fondly, pleased that Phil had enjoyed himself. He’d thought it important to get everything squared away in making Phil as comfortable and satisfied as possible now when things would shortly become so drastically different. He didn’t want to leave room for regrets though he wasn’t sure the word had ever fit in Phil’s vocabulary. In a way, he saw all this preparation and their imminent move as a collective farewell to their past- a farewell to the five years spent in this flat and also to the people they’d once been, in effect clearing a path to the people they would go on to become in the future, leaving room for them both to create new memories and embrace a different way of life, one infused with endless evenings for them to enjoy together however they pleased.

“Yeah, I did eat well actually,” Phil says. “I just finished having some toast with coffee about an hour before you came home.”

Dan throws up his hands in a mock gesture for Phil to slow down. “Whoa, watch out. Toast with coffee? Who’s being impulsive now?”

Phil laughs. “I had a full on sweets/sushi/pizza fest these past few months. I thought that was enough to be getting on with and…well, I don’t know. I’m already full of nerves as it is. I’m not exactly keen on stuffing myself and getting indigestion at the last minute.”

“Pretty sure indigestion is the last thing you have to worry about here.” Dan pauses on an afterthought and looks at Phil searchingly. “ _Are_ you worried? About any of it? Because it’s fine if you are you know. You just have to tell me and we can wait-”

“I don’t want to wait.” Phil’s voice is firm and for an instant his face resumes the quiet somber intensity of his expression from before, but this time it’s one Dan recognizes as conveying heartfelt sincerity instead of frustration. “I told you before, I’m ready. We’ve discussed this a million times and I’m positive. I want to do this.”

It’s suddenly difficult to think of how best to respond to the caliber of trust and unwavering courage behind Phil’s words and instead Dan turns his head to glance at the TV and the program that’s been set to low volume the entire time as a means of background noise. He wonders what other people usually did when they felt as if their entire bodies were being drowned by a tide of emotion greater than they could contain; overwhelmed by an overload of affection that no action or words seemed appropriate enough to convey. What to do when love suddenly became an emotion so much larger than you? He’s only glad Phil understands his silence as the moment of reflection he needed to rearrange his thoughts back into a cohesive state where his entire being no longer felt ready to spontaneously combust. A quiver of vulnerability settles in his chest, a warm shivering feeling that threatens to shake him apart from the force of everything he can’t describe like a bird waking up to a fragile dawn with no other recourse to express its existence than to burst into a trill of song, louder and greater than its own tiny form. He finds it incredible and wonderful beyond words that he could still feel like this after so many years in Phil’s presence, as if this were the first time they were meeting all over again and he’d just been bombarded with more affection than he could contain or understand. There’s a surreal aspect to it all, like an out of body experience or the blissful runner’s high of euphoria preceding a monumental revelation where all the answers he’d ever needed or wanted to find were no further than his own presence and the reciprocal pleasure and fierce pride he took in being where he was and who he was with.

In hindsight, it’s not on par with the discovery of the Higgs boson or inventing Wi-Fi, but damned if it didn’t feel just as stunning and life altering to him all the same. He understood the meaning behind the old refrain that absence made the heart grow fonder, but he wondered if there wasn’t something a bit off about it too when here he was in close proximity to Phil, surrounded by all the familiar possessions they’d accumulated over five years, and instead of being fed up with it all he wanted nothing more than to remain in the consistent orbit of each other’s presence, not out of obligation or fear, but out of the surge of contented bliss that enveloped him whenever he thought of the strange and incredible path his life had taken and how much more enriched it had become with Phil at his side.

 _Here we are then,_ he thinks. _We made it full circle to the end of one part of our lives to begin a whole new one_. _This is really it and I’m scared, but god, I am so happy. Inexpressibly, perfectly happy. We’re here and we’re going to make the best of what we can, however we can starting now. Right now._

Just nine months ago their conversation in this lounge had been wracked with frenetic, anxious energy on the night Dan had revealed exactly what had happened to him along with all the many doubts and fears that had surfaced with his new transformation. Phil had been sat in the exact same corner of the sofa just like tonight, once again vaguely feline in the unconscious elegance of his casual posture, legs crossed and left arm bent as his head rested in the cup of his open palm; once again willing to listen to Dan, to love and to trust him no matter what might happen next. There’s no anxious energy coming from either of them now save for the small buzz of nerves that usually came with starting any new endeavor. The TV drones on with its usual string of advertisements and movie trailers in a row and beyond the cozy walls of their lounge London continues its gritty urban fanfare of snorting exhausts and wailing sirens, soon to be followed by the all too familiar mechanical racket of drills and saws in the morning, but the only sound he hears with any clarity, the only sound that overpowers all the rest including the persistent burble of his own thoughts, is the even, rhythmic pulse of Phil’s heart. He looks back to find Phil staring at him with a commanding intensity he’s not sure even Phil himself is aware of. He noticed it more during long road trips or train rides when he might glance up from the playlist on his phone to notice Phil staring rapt and unblinking at the blurs of landscape outside his window, clearly focused on everything but the trees and houses flickering by; instead, lost in his own vibrant world of thoughts not even Dan could guess the shape and direction of after so many years. In some ways Phil would always be an enigma, a strange and incredible person embodying a constant promise of mystery Dan thinks he would never grow tired of unraveling, certain that Phil would always reveal something else in an unexpected turn of a comment or idea to surprise him. Phil doesn’t seem prepared to share his internal dialogue with Dan just yet, but it’s not difficult to guess the theme behind every thought flickering by in his head, not with that ubiquitous high, sweet fragrance filling the room and his eyes fixed directly on Dan. For a moment, Dan sees a glimmer of the vampire lord version of Phil from the dream, someone regal and intense and breathtaking with a presence of character to rival Yilmaz’s, though Dan thinks the absence of the fur lined cape accentuating the powerful angles of his shoulders and chest is a regrettable loss to the overall effect. Still, there’s something powerfully intimidating and incredible about his stare; about the sinuous heat of every unspoken sentiment behind it rooted in trust and desire and Dan meets the magnetic pull of it as he stares back, his own heart thrumming a little quicker from its usual torpid pace to keep time to the growing hunger itching at his fangs.

It was time. They could both feel the attracting tug of urgency like a prickle of dry heat on their skin and talking any further would be to needlessly delay what they both had been meticulously preparing for these past few months. Yet, Dan thinks it better to let Phil decide. Soon he’d be tottering on the brink between life and death to embody both and if he needed a moment to collect himself before they started, Dan wanted him to take all the time he required.

“Do you think you’re ready or you want to keep on a little longer sorting through all this?” Dan nods at the piles of clothing on the floor and the unpacked items still waiting for their cushioned swathes of bubble wrap to be applied.

“No. If I’m honest, I haven’t been able to pay attention to anything all day,” Phil says. As he glances over at the menagerie of boxes again some of the intensity of his stare ebbs away, but a ghost of it remains in the piercing glint of his eyes. “I thought trying to do a few chores would help distract me and make the time go faster, but I feel like I’ve been stuck on autopilot just waiting for you to come home.”

“Same here. After everything with Yilmaz, I was surprised I was able to get any sleep on the train ride back. Though I’d really like to take a shower first if you think you can wait a little longer.”

“No worries. I’ll wait for you then. But er, which room-?”

“Wherever you like,” Dan says, ‘wherever you feel comfortable,’ is what he means to imply though he already knows without asking that on leaving the bathroom he’ll come back upstairs to find Phil laid out on the monochromatic duvet of his bed.

Phil nods as if confirming this silent thought. “Right then. See you in a bit.”

 With that, they both stand up in unison, Phil turning to finish gathering up a small pile of clothes into the designated charity box and Dan turning to leave for his room to quickly gather a comfortable shirt and pajama bottoms to change into after his shower. As Phil had mentioned he feels as if he’s operating on auto pilot, executing each action with the unthinking grace of habit. Once he finally winds his way into the shower his mind remains blissfully blank. All he feels is the warm stipple of the showerhead’s spray coasting along his shoulders and all he hears is the pleasant echo of the water bouncing off the tiles in tune to the small drizzle of rain against the window. It’s incredibly satisfying not to have to think of anything else more urgent than chasing away the suds of soap on his arms and running his fingers through his hair to squeeze out the last traces of conditioner. Though he would always favor the adrenaline rush and wonder of fantasy over the oftentimes bleaker state of real world events, the mundane still carries its own kind of soothing catharsis to relax his muscles and ease the tense clench of his jaw or perhaps it was more to do with the comfort of carrying out the mundane in the safety of his own home, enjoying the quietude that came with having no other pressing responsibility than to care for himself and for each other. He later closes the taps and towels himself off in this same numb state of calm and when he leaves the bathroom he snaps off each light behind him as he always did when he was the last one up, not at all scared by the long shadows gathering behind him and not surprised to see the TV off and Phil absent from the lounge. With each successive darkened room left in his wake it’s as if his mind buffers every noise in turn, switching off the ever present backbeat of the city outside to a pure and total silence. He can’t even hear the low whirr of their refrigerator’s compressor or the muffled thrum of their neighbor’s heart through the walls. The entire flat might have been hurtled back to the primordial beginning of time when all creation waited in the dense hush of penumbral darkness for the bang that would catalyze the universe into existence, bringing with it a surge of sound and light to fill the void between nothing and something. And why not? After all, this evening marked an era of rebirth and new beginnings, albeit less dramatic than the creation of the entire universe, though in Dan’s mind just as pivotal regardless. Everything rested in his hands now. George had instructed him well, covered all the bases behind the process to leave no room for doubt or fatal error. Even so, Dan could never be sure if anything he tried might turn out alright until after it was finished; if his ideas might be seen as more self-indulgent upon realization or if a witty remark might flop on delivery after leaving his mouth, and despite George’s thorough lessons he has no certainty things might turn out alright now, but Phi’s constant presence, his constant trust and Dan’s own willingness to see this night through just as he had months ago in front of the Court, surrounded by the constant threat of danger, gives him all the impetus he needs to continue walking down the hall to his room without a trace of hesitation.

He opens the door and the swelling chorus of Phil’s pulse immediately shatters the silence. Each contracting heave and subside of his heart rings out like a deep toned bell Dan can feel resonating through every fibrous bundle of muscle and nerves in his body and it takes a concentrated effort for him to quell the sound of it back down to a low murmur. Even then, it remains the loudest noise in the room, the only one he cares about. The lights are all switched off except for his amber lamp and the constellated glow of the laser pod he’d bought years ago, still unpacked along with a slew of other belongings he’d continued to procrastinate storing away. Many things might change in the course of eternity, but putting certain unpleasant tasks off to the last minute would apparently never be one of them. Phil as expected is sprawled comfortably on his back in the center of the grey and black patterned duvet of the bed. In place of his removed contacts Dan notices he’s now wearing a pair of black framed glasses, the lenses of which are opaquely tinted with the backlit gleam of the open browser visible on the cellphone in his hands. He’s completely engrossed in whatever he’s reading, but when Dan enters the rest of the way into the room he immediately looks up and smiles, his eyes once more becoming visible as the neon reflection of his phone drops away.

 “Anything interesting on the interwebs tonight,” Dan asks softly.

Phil doesn’t immediately reply and instead angles the screen for Dan to see the realtor’s website full of listings for houses he’d been scrolling through. “Thought I’d do a bit of cheeky browsing while I waited for you,” he says. “It’s more like window shopping really as we can’t exactly move anywhere yet, but it doesn’t hurt to see what’s available and get a feel for prices at the same time.”

“That’s efficient.” Dan unceremoniously dumps his clothing onto the seat of the butt chair by his piano, where it had spent weeks acting more as an unconventional laundry basket than a piano bench, before going to sit at the foot of the bed by Phil’s crossed ankles. “What’s the verdict so far? Find anything good yet?”

 “Loads of decent houses with big gardens, a few with indoor pools and some with fireplaces large enough to park a car in. I even saw a couple of swanky penthouse suites that looked quite nice and a few mansions on Bishop’s Avenue that were abandoned for one reason or another, but nothing ‘perfect’ so far.”

“Bishop’s Avenue, huh?” Dan smirks. “Suddenly money is no object?”

Phil laughs and sets the phone down on the end table to his left. “Technically it isn’t, but don’t worry, I’m not planning on cornering the market of mega-luxury estates. I was just curious. Besides, I don’t think we’d be happy living on ‘Billionaire’s Row’ and from how many vacant properties are up for sale there I guess other people feel the same way.”

“Well, if nothing else works out we have all those other properties we’re suddenly the sole owners of to consider,” Dan says. “Though if the last mansion we were in is any indication, they’re all probably just as overwrought and impractically enormous.”

“Maybe, but we could always take a look at them when we have time and see if we couldn’t renovate one to our liking. Then we could sell the others or convert them into studios or offices we could use for filming and other related business ventures.” Phil looks keenly excited by this idea and the low chorus of his heart briefly tics up in volume as it speeds along in a merry rush of inspiration.

“Alright, Richard Branson, slow down,” Dan says wryly, trying for a veneer of sarcasm and failing in the face of Phil’s infectious delight. There were too many things for them both not to become excited by. Even without Yilmaz’s unexpected gift, the future held the promise of innumerable opportunities for them to take advantage of and enjoy. They were in a transitionary period where the proverbial stars had aligned to accommodate endless possibilities, each one promising endless more outcomes as flexible and varied as their own imaginations. The irrepressibly realist part of Dan’s brain cautions him to remember that sometimes the results of long pursued dreams did not always live up to the investment of effort put into them; that sometimes luck and success were too closely linked for comfort and sometimes neither luck nor effort aligned in the right way to achieve the success one wished for at all, but at the same time he reasons these were simply the usual, unpredictable variables of life. Conflict, uncertainty and failure would always present themselves as obstacles to be faced regardless of preternatural strength or immortality, but Dan is determined now to meet them with the best of himself; surrounded by the best people who would unfailingly rise to the occasion to help him should he ask. Strength in self-belief and strength in the help of those he trusted - these were the safeguards which would guide him through all the twists and turns of eternity, though at the moment his thoughts are only with the one most trusted and best loved person he wished to share that adventure of eternity with above all others.

Phil watches him carefully the entire time this brief reflection passes through his head, but says nothing. Somehow, from one moment to the next, in an instant of unconscious synchronicity, they’ve both reached the mutual understanding that there’s nothing more to say. Instead, Phil opens his arms, beckoning wordlessly and Dan goes to him with a quiet sigh, inexorably drawn into the magnetic pull of his presence as had always been the case from the start. There are no mind games between them here; no threats and none of the cheap falsity of glamour to compel Dan’s compliance. He willingly leans over the bed into the familiar broad and gentle embrace Phil offers and suddenly all his senses are consumed in the burst of fragranced affection which envelops him as soon as Phil’s hands close around his back. The equally overwhelming spiced tinge of Phil’s blood thundering strong and eager under his skin becomes a deafening symphony to draw Dan closer, enticing his hunger to the fore with astonishing speed, but where in the not so distant past it had been unrestrained and avaricious, now it’s a governable urge Dan is able to keep from blinding him with its original lethal ferocity. He’s still met with the tempting impulse to press Phil back into the pillows under his head and deliver a deep, openmouthed bite of a kiss against his throat, to drown himself in gout after gout of sweet, rich blood until it submerged him as completely as it had in the dream. His fangs instinctively lengthen to curving points in his mouth to follow through with the nature of their design, to pierce their prey and hold it fast until there was nothing left to drink, but he quickly checks the desire before it can evolve from an idle thought to a serious plan. He couldn’t take everything, no matter how strongly his hunger might beg for him to. George had already warned him this was a careful dance of give and take; of restraint and care, a maxim which could have been applied to most things in life but which was most applicable and crucial here. If he acted too hastily and gave in to the raw impulse egging him on, he’d destroy them both in an instant without the recourse of second chances or apologies to set things right again. To distract himself further from the instigating nudge of his atavistic longings, Dan gently lifts Phil’s glasses off the bridge of his nose and places them on the end table, aware that soon Phil would never need to wear either contacts or glasses ever again. He imagines Phil keeping the frames anyway in a box somewhere in the back of storage unit to be rediscovered centuries later in a fit of nostalgia for him to remark on the time when as a human he’d needed two pieces of altered glass fixed over his eyes in order to see. It’s not difficult to see Phil keeping all the old contrivances of his prior existence for sentimental value, like a bizarre dragon hoard containing everything from eyeglasses to toasters and long-lived kettles. If the Court had been keen on embellishing their mansions with Greek statues and priceless antiques, Phil’s version would contain a basement housing a museum full of household artifacts he no longer needed to use. He has a brief vision of Phil staring wistfully at a broken popcorn machine like an alternate take on Hamlet and Yorick and nearly chokes.

“Do I want to know what’s so funny?” Phil raises his eyebrows as Dan tries to muffle the sound of stifled laughter into his shoulder.

“No,” Dan mumbles into the fabric of Phil’s shirt. “It’s not important.”

And it wasn’t, not when the sound of Phil’s heart churning up currents of blood so close beneath the surface of his skin quickly overpowers every conscious and subconscious thought, leaving only enough room for Dan to focus on the tightening knot of hunger in his chest. He nuzzles into the tender spot between Phil’s earlobe and collarbone, honing into the lively tributary of the carotid where the smell of blood was strongest and where George had told him the arterial pressure was most powerful and the taste richer. His fangs ache to bite down at once, but he does nothing except rest his cheek against Phil’s throat, content for the moment to listen to the liquid thrum of his humanity, to memorize the personal signature of its beat before it slowed forever, but at the feel of Dan’s cold skin Phil shudders beneath him and swallows hard.

“You alright?” Dan turns his head, instantly concerned, but he’s met with the blissful, curiously pleased look on Phil’s face. He doesn’t receive an answer to his question, but Phil nods and to further reinforce the sentiment of steady trust behind it his hands squeeze reassuringly along Dan’s back, encouraging him to continue. That single gesture coupled with the ever present hypnotic rhythm of blood draws Dan’s head back down into place and he noses the long bared plane of skin where he can plainly see the thin imprint of the carotid minutely pulsing away. So fragile and vulnerable, words he’d never thought to associate with Phil, but to see the visible effort of life in action, to know he would soon seize it between his teeth to drink it down and reassert a new definition of life in its place, sobers Dan to treat the gravity of those implications with care and grant Phil all the deference of respect he deserved. As he moves into a more comfortable position, it’s not difficult to understand the muzzy, half drunken expression Phil had given him. There’s a strange but incredibly satisfying pleasure he derives from just lying there, enjoying the snug embrace of Phil’s arms and the reliable heave of his chest rising and falling in even breaths like the leisurely bobbing rhythm of calm waters. He could fall asleep like this he realizes. Without any qualms whatsoever he could easily quell the impatient writhe of his hunger to instead postpone the eventuality of eternity for another night and just lay like this together with no other motive or purpose than to enjoy the quiet intimacy of proximity.

 _What could be better than this,_ he thinks and though his brain wryly supplies a list of interesting, more suggestive pleasures they could enjoy, each option conceivably better than the last, he settles into the simpler delight afforded by the solid line of warmth Phil’s body makes under his. But out of all the tasks he might consider procrastinating, this isn’t one of them. Time might lose all meaning in the grand sweep of immortality where time was all one had, but opportunities weren’t so liberal in their availability and if they let this chance pass them by now when they were both ready, who knew if some unforeseen complication or tragedy might later spring up with a nasty surprise to rob them of another chance. The idea tugs the corner of Dan’s mouth into a small involuntary snarl of protective instinct. _Possessive more like_ , a sly echo of Eris’ voice speaks up in his head, but he ignores it. Possessive was something he reserved for things in his room, for his shoes and his clothes and his phone, but what he feels now is more aligned with the defensive streak exhibited by any person who cared for their loved ones enough to put everything on the line to preserve and uphold their lives. Phil had already proven the true extent of his strength throughout the years, going on to survive a gauntlet of vampires as nothing more than the clever and capable human he already was, but now Dan wanted to augment that strength, to grant Phil a lease of centuries in which he could further cultivate his interests and abilities as he pleased without the worry of time, old age or mortal injury to hinder him. After tonight they would have innumerable evenings to enjoy according to the flavor of their particular desires and if those evenings eventually led to the prophetic fulfillment of his dream, ending with them both enjoying each other’s embrace between fanged kisses in a stone fortress surrounded by a bioluminous haze and the leathery wings of mutated bats outside the windows, then so be it. Better to start that journey now than to put it off and never be able to revisit this moment again.

He turns his head and looks at Phil, studies this strange and charming example of a person who had once owned a pet shrimp named Simon, hoarded bath towels after every shower and enjoyed long evenings at home spent watching anime or animal documentaries with a bowl of popcorn neatly situated in his lap.

 _I’m bringing you with me_ , Dan thinks. _You and all the colorful, bizarre, varied worlds in your head, the same ones that brought so much color to my own life- I want it all. I want you, just as you are. I want you next to me in my life._

The force of single minded resolve behind this desire stokes his hunger to a peak of urgency and it races through every tangled circuit of nerves in his body with a light headed rush of adrenaline and heat. The aching weight of his fangs curve further down like unsheathed daggers and he opens his mouth to prevent the sharp points from resting painfully against the tender inner lining of his bottom lip. Phil’s involuntary hitching gasp of surprise beneath him alerts Dan that his eyes must have also reacted accordingly to the assertive pull of his hunger to become foreboding and dark in his face like twin eclipses. It didn’t matter how many times Phil had glimpsed him drinking his nightly serving of blood in the kitchen with his eyes dark and fangs bared wide. The visual always managed to unsettle him. And why wouldn’t it, Dan thinks, monsters were the things myths had implicitly and directly taught humans to run away from, to be afraid of, not to own a home with and calmly embrace in bed, but despite the little jump of instinctive surprise Phil always gave on noticing the other half of Dan’s nature there had never been any fear or revulsion behind it. Even now Phil meets his black hole of a stare with open wonder and at no time does the fragrant scent of Phil’s affection or trust diminish. They’d been through enough with the Court and had faced more difficult challenges over the years without the added complications of supernatural forces to ever seriously entertain doubt in each other. Time, conflict and adversity were the true tests of character, the ones that determined the difference between the truly monstrous and the compassionately human, and in Phil’s eyes Dan had passed all with flying colors long ago. In demonstration of his confidence, Phil quietly settles back onto the pillow and turns his head, tilting it back to bare the side of his throat where the tic of his pulse is most visible. This time Dan lets his instincts take over and he presses his mouth to the carotid, skims the points of his fangs over the skin, and breathes in the scent of blood, so pungently sweet and overwhelming.

 _Carefully now. Carefully._ George’s instructive advice comes to mind again, quelling the more reckless force of his appetite before it can insinuate itself over his self-control. _His heart will be in your hands in every meaning of the phrase, short of being literal. Too quickly and you’ll kill him from the strain before you’re even aware of it. So for your sake and his, remember yourself. Don’t rush things, take your time and have a care._

Susan had mentioned similar words of caution when a group of bikers had paused on the road outside the flat to gun their engines in a growling racket to rival the construction company’s drills.  
“You ever get a motorcycle, do yourself a favor and don’t rev it past the red line like a hotheaded ass or you risk blowing the motor to hell,” she’d said with a disapproving downturn of her mouth as she’d peered out the window at the idling red taillights of the bikes and their grandstanding owners. “People forget what they have and run it into the ground then wonder why it didn’t last. You have something you care about you take care of it, you treat it well.”

Dan had agreed though he’d thought it best not to mention all the times he’d casually thrown his laptop across the room onto his bed when he was too lazy to walk over and place it there himself. Motorcycles and laptops were replaceable after all, but people weren’t and when it came to what he most cared about all of it could be summed up in the basso downbeat of the pulse filling the room in a chorus he would soon go on to reconstruct and preserve forever if he acted with care to acknowledge his impulse without giving into it. So thinking, on the next even swell of Phil’s chest rising on a calm inhale, Dan cradles the back of Phil’s head with his left hand, lowers the points of his fangs directly over the center of the busy artery and with a trembling sigh of relief and tense anticipation he pierces Phil’s throat, straight through to the inviting surge of blood underneath.

Shock. Luxuriant pleasure. Triumph and satisfaction. All these emotions and more flood Dan’s head immediately as a frothing jet of blood drowns his mouth. It’s just like it had been on that first blundering night when he’d accidentally bit Phil’s arm and been treated to an indescribable burst of flavor making him think he might suffocate to death in the wake of the devastating sensory overload it had brought on, though at the time, caught between blind instinct and feral joy, he’d thought if death could be that blissful then what a way to go. Now is no different. The taste is richer, sweeter and more powerful as George had warned him it would be; made all the more distinctive by the singular heart of the person caught under his fangs. He’s not sure if it has anything to do with the stark difference between the impersonal nature of the reheated blood he bought from the butcher or that which came from a source that was human and alive or if it was just that Phil’s blood conveyed every invisible nuance of his strength and character in ways that the initial bite on his arm could have never prepared Dan to experience, watered down as the encounter had been by their mutual terror. Now however, locked onto a larger conduit of an artery than the thin veins in Phil’s arm and invited to remain and drink his fill as he needed to, Dan is treated to the full demonstration of what he’d only had a brief taste of before, as if he’d just cracked open a door leading to the private room of Phil’s self, letting in a torrent of memories, emotions, idle musings and all the other unnamed forces which combined to create the person known as Phil Lester.

Each throb of his heart and subsequent spurt of blood sends a renewed electric crush of sensations through Dan’s body, almost painful in the concentrated force of their power, what Dan thinks it would feel like to swim against a riptide in a hurricane. Dan holds onto Phil’s shoulders as if he really were in danger of being swept away and he matches every quaking shudder of Phil’s body with his own. The temptation to steal every drop of liquid heat coursing down his mouth is strong, but even if he felt a stronger inclination to do so, he’s certain Phil wouldn’t easily relent. At the moment, although he might be drifting along on the induced buzz of pleasure from Dan’s bite and the more dangerous high of blood loss, his heart continues to stubbornly beat in the same relentless rhythm as it had on the night when Dan had pulled him unconscious and unbreathing from the depths of the great aquarium they’d fallen into. Phil, as always, is a lesson in strident vitality- life and light in human form. Dan finds himself as humbled by it as he is astonished. How could one person contain so much within them? He’d never stopped asking himself this question from the moment they’d met, from the moment Phil had shifted from an abstract point of inspiration to an integral presence in his life, and he’s certain he would find himself pausing somewhere in the long reach of the future to ask it again.

Dan’s teeth sink in deeper and at the keener edge of pressure at his throat Phil writhes under him, fingers digging into Dan’s spine like hooked claws keeping him pinned in place against the consistent rise and fall of Phil’s chest. They move against each other in a subtle, accommodating back and forth dance neither is aware of, both of them synchronized to react fluidly to every minute flex of fingers in hair and the weighted press of skin against skin with an answering sigh or shiver. Dan’s hips move in a sinuous downward grind, unconsciously keeping time to the lumbering beat of the pulse filling his mouth, and in response Phil groans, a rumbling, yearning sound that travels through Dan’s head in resonant tremors so it no longer feels as if he’s caught in the riptide of a hurricane but stuck in the middle of an earthquake instead, one he’s content to endure to the final, incredible end. It occurs to him that he could concentrate and dull the sensations to something less of an impactful free-for-all muddling his thoughts with intoxicating flashes of color, sound, emotions and textures all comprising the untranslatable synesthetic flavor of Phil’s entire being, but he wants to experience every raw edge of sensation, certain this time that he can handle it. More so he finds himself welcoming it as he falls further and further down into a haze of complex pleasure, skirting the edge of oblivion as Phil’s heart finally begins to lag and slow. Still, the hands on Dan’s back retain their strong grip, kneading slowly into his skin like a pleased cat retracting and extending its claws and this too adds to the surfeit of hedonistic stimulus flooding Dan’s brain. For his part, Phil seems just as content to remain where he is, tumbling further and further down together with Dan into the tenebrous space between life and death.

His groans ebb away to a low atonic hum and his heart’s trudging pace further slackens. The blood doesn’t flow as hot or strong anymore and all the essence of Phil’s inimitable verve each powerful draught once conveyed dulls to a faded impression at the back of Dan’s mind like a blurry projection of an image fast losing shape as anything recognizable. He withdraws his fangs and out of unselfconscious reflex laps up the tiny beaded drops which well up to the surface of the small wounds in Phil’s throat, relishing it like a child might enjoy the last sliver of chocolate bar left in the wrapper, but although he’s wildly tempted to sink his fangs in again for another true mouthful he stops himself from finishing off the meager amount of blood left for Phil’s taxing heart to circulate as it struggles not to stop completely.

 Phil shivers again though his toneless humming remains unchanged and his eyes flicker to and fro sporadically under his closed eyelids, caught in the feverish throes of an unknown dream threatening to soon fade away to a permanent vacuum of nothingness if Dan doesn’t act fast. They had arrived at the penultimate moment of change where timing was everything. As he cups Phil’s cheek to keep his head from lolling sideways at an uncomfortable angle on the pillow, George’s words once again surge up in his thoughts to guide him on: _A human’s heart will beat in equivalence to how much blood is lost to compensate for the severe drop in blood pressure. At this point, his heart will begin to overwork itself to keep up. You’ll hear it. Fast, frantic beating. That’s when you need to act. If you wait too long or if you continue to take blood when you hear that sound- it’ll stop and by then it’ll be too late._

Dan closes his eyes and hears it, a frenzied thudding like the beat of a hummingbird’s wings from Phil’s chest, small and barely audible but there. Phil’s eyes continue their blind searching behind his eyelids and Dan wonders what he must be seeing right now, who he might be looking for. His entire body is still feverishly warm despite the acute blood loss blanching his face to a ghostly complexion and the humming from his throat persists with every shallow exhale of breath as if he were struggling to break through the dense fog of unconsciousness to say something. Like the dystopian green world of the Neo London from Dan’s dream, Phil’s body instinctively resists the finality of death, reeling from it to impose his own stubborn demand for the abundance and promise of life instead.

 _Alright then, you strange, beautiful, incredible person. Let’s go_ , Dan thinks. _Together. Like always. Be with me. Live forever._

He brings his wrist to his mouth and bites down deep into the branching arteries now ripe with the infused brew of his blood commingled with Phil’s. A scarlet rill flows out at once, swirling around his arm to his elbow in a coiled spiral like a barber’s pole. Before it can overflow and drip onto the bed he presses his wrist to Phil’s mouth and waits. At first nothing happens. Phil remains insensible and rigid on the bed and the blood slowly trickles out of the corner of his mouth in a pendulous line towards his chin. The weighted pause Dan had felt before, the interminable depth of silence he’d likened to the precursory moments before the Big Bang, fills his ears with unbearable pressure and he begins to feel the tingling onset of panic despite the continued fluttery pace of Phil’s heart, albeit so quiet as to be nearly subliminal.

“Drink, Phil,” Dan mutters. “Sorry it isn’t a horrifyingly sweet coconut cocktail, but this is all we’ve got on tap at the moment, so drink. Now. _Please_.”

The last word trembles with the force of anxious dread behind it as Phil seems content to do nothing else except lie there motionless with a thin trickle of red uselessly winding its way under the shelf of his chin, but then something in the air quickens. A palpable and startling shift of energy overtakes the room and Phil suddenly clamps down on Dan’s wrist. His eyes are still closed but they’re no longer searching for whatever he’d lost in the darkness of his waking dream. Now they’re staring blindly straight ahead, the corners scrunched with fierce concentration at the taste of the blood filling his mouth. It’s a predatory, serious expression, one not becoming of Phil at all and yet Dan is transfixed by it, once again as always fascinated, this time by the powerful aura of survival and strength Phil displays even in extremis as he finally drinks his fill. His spine bows up from the bed, arms and legs wracked with tiny spasms as the blood begins to trace new paths through his veins; permeating every organ, muscle and tissue in his body with the thermic energy of transformation to burn away all remnants of his old biology and leave a clean slate for a new one to be embedded in its wake. The toneless humming resumes and becomes a suggestive rumbling groan at the back of his throat. It’s the same sound Dan had heard many times before when it was his mouth pressed to Phil’s and not his wrist; when their bodies found a rhythm together that had more to do with the friction of intimacy and not the sanguine endogenesis meticulously rearranging Phil’s cells into that of a preternatural creature. His hands fly up to seize Dan’s arm, pulling it towards him with incredible force as if he meant to curl his entire body around it like a pillow or to claim it like a large predatory cat might claim its prey. Dan relents and allows himself to be enfolded in that tight embrace as Phil’s muscles roil and writhe beneath him, electrified by the blood he continues to take in one gulping mouthful after another. Pressed so close against his chest, Dan can feel as well as hear the breakneck canter of Phil’s heart. The blood powers through each valve, restoring its rhythm back to an even strident beat instead of the agitated stutter that had afflicted it just moments before, but even so Dan hears it skipping slower and slower in the face of the potent blood gradually remapping its physiological response to assume a vampire’s torpid plod.  He’d be comfortable with remaining where he is, laid across Phil’s chest listening to the hypnotic lull of metamorphosis happening beneath him, but he’s growing drowsy. The blood loss might not kill him, but it’s sending him into a languid shock of heavy limbs and a heavier fatigue he can’t shake off. Yet, Phil continues to drink with mindless, ravenous indulgence and Dan lets him. He endures the lightheaded ache growing at his temples along with the stinging paresthetic sensation settling at the tips of his fingers and toes and even as he drifts deeper into a confused haze somewhere between pleasure and pain he keeps his wrist at Phil’s mouth, determined that he should have the best possible chance at eternity- to grant him the ability to meet the world with the best and strongest of himself, the same chance as Phil had given him eight years ago in bursts of inspiration Phil himself had never been quite aware of at the time.

The room spins and darkness creeps in at the edges of Dan’s vision, framing Phil’s face like a deckled vignette. Somewhere, from the farthest reaches of his memory, he hears the soft trill of a piano playing a song he doesn’t recognize and yet finds familiar all the same, something to do with trials by fire and the persistence of love despite impossible odds. The fatigue worsens and Dan’s head becomes a lead weight on his neck. The last thing he hears before he succumbs is the ghostly echo of piano keys and the accompanying syncopated beat of a heart thudding slowly through the thin fabric of his shirt pressed against Phil’s chest. The blurry film across his eyes quickly spreads to an opaque totality swallowing the room in shadows and after that he doesn’t hear or see anything else at all.

 

❧

 

Blinking. Vision hazy and unclear. An amber glow. A white ceiling and a chandelier in constant peril of falling from the long crack striking it dead center of the mooring holding it in place. After a suspended moment of numb uncertainty, like floating half in and out of a dream, feeling returns to Dan’s limbs and he orients himself back to the familiar walls and ceiling of his bedroom as he gently grips his rumpled duvet beneath his hands and listens to the muffled rattle of an idling bus welcoming him back to consciousness with London’s perpetual soundtrack. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, if only a few minutes or a few hours, but he senses the quiet lull of evening still present outside the carefully shielded windows so perhaps it hadn’t been too long since he’d blacked out. His awareness blooms, chasing away the unsettled tingle of paralysis in his body though hunger promptly slips in to replace it. He understands why of course. He’d given Phil as much blood as he’d taken and now the void left behind demanded to be filled again. The fridge had been stocked well in advance for this occasion with containers full to the brim with blood, enough to appease their appetites for a month, but Dan forces the keen edge of hunger to the back of his mind, interested in one thing only –in one person.

A delicate shifting movement at his side makes him look up to see Phil sat up in the bed, staring back down at him with black eyes like gleaming melanite. The scattered light of the amber lamp gathers in a thin gold aura across his shoulders and around his head, giving Phil an ethereal mien to match the eerie depth of his stare. Dan cautiously moves to sit up as well and Phil’s eyes follow him the entire time without a word, his face blank of all expression. He remains motionless for so long, watching in prolonged unblinking silence, Dan becomes unnerved and without thinking of the words as they tumble from his mouth he asks in an unsteady voice, “are you there?”

In the answering interim of silence Dan’s thoughts race in winding circuits through his head. _Did I do it wrong?_ _What if I did it wrong? Will he still be the same? What if he’s not? God, Phil, say something please. Please_ -!

He knows he’d followed each step through with all the care and restraint prescribed, but he’s still terrified to think he might have somehow flubbed up the process somewhere in the middle to exchange a pleasant, charming, affable personality for one that was purely the ravenous creature of myth Phil now too closely resembled- an apathetic stranger that shared only Phil’s appearance and nothing of his vitality and charm, but just as panic begins to rear its head with a vengeance to rival even the yearning jab of hunger, Phil suddenly blinks hard as if coming back to himself after a particularly vivid daydream and seems to notice Dan for the first time. His eyes remain pitch black, but the cold passivity of his face swaps out for a more inquisitive expression as he looks slowly around the room, taking in the new perspectives of light, shadow and color his heightened senses begin to relay back to his brain in overwhelming bursts of information Dan remembers experiencing on his first night staggering home from the flower shop.

“Dan. You-I can see you.” Phil’s head turns back to him and without warning he crowds Dan against the bed, surging into his personal space with a startling rush of speed that leaves Dan’s back pressed up stiff against the headboard and their noses barely an inch apart. “I can _see_ you.”

“Of course you can see me, you spork. You’re looking right at me.” Dan tries for nonchalant humor and fails, too unsettled by the impression of talking down into a cavernous well as he stares back into eyes that appear to have no end to their darkness. The inquisitive look on Phil’s face has adopted a stark predatory cunning which doesn’t help. It’s an abstract lilt of consideration Dan can’t determine might be more to do with raw hunger or benign curiosity and once again on nervous impulse he asks, “are you there?” and knows he means to say, ‘ _is it still you?_ ’

Phil startles at the question, momentarily taken aback as if he wasn’t sure himself. The brief look of surprise helps lend him an edge of personability that wasn’t there before and it’s a human enough expression, more so a recognizably ‘Phil expression,’ to relax Dan’s nerves.

“Sorry, I’m here, I’m listening to you,” Phil says. “It’s just I can hardly speak. This is-” He leans back and closes his eyes. His lips part with a dreamy expression, allowing Dan to see the fangs in his mouth, delicate elongated points that Phil licks once in afterthought before assuming a look of pained concentration, visibly trying to clear his head of all the conflicting signals and stimuli bombarding it. When he looks up again his eyes are bright and blue and normal though wide with astonishment. “I…This is….”

“This is what?” Dan prods him for the last part of his half-finished sentence, but he’s not sure he wants to hear the answer, especially if it might turn out to be one expressing regret or horror. The hunger must be tugging at Phil with earnest now, as it did for all recently turned new bloods, and when it peaked, astonishment would soon swap out for the anxious urge to feed. Dan knows how it must feel, like every nerve and vein moving restlessly against his bones in a frenzied sensation that had left him half delirious. Phil however, true to form, defies all expectations and manages to ignore it, apparently more interested in staring at Dan as if he’d just discovered the eighth wonder of the world. He doesn’t immediately give a reply to Dan’s question. Instead he reaches forward slowly, carefully and cups his hands on either side of Dan’s cheeks to pull him in for a lingering, searing kiss to communicate what he can’t find adequate words to say in a manner that leaves Dan sharing the wide eyed and dazed expression on Phil’s face when they drift apart.

 “Well, that-er- that says more than enough I guess.” Dan collects himself with some effort and manages to speak again once the tingling imprint of Phil’s mouth ebbs away from his bottom lip. “Hang on, aren’t you hungry?”

Phil starts to shake his head, then pauses and thinks about it. “Yes and no. There’s so much going on I’m not sure what I’m feeling. I can hear things; sense them- people’s voices, their heartbeats even their thoughts or maybe it’s more their emotions, I don’t know how to describe it. But now I understand what you mean by how overwhelming it all is. There are so many details I never noticed before-combinations of sounds, textures and shadows- It’s so much, like being able to see a spectrum of reality I never noticed before, the way some animals can see different wavelengths of color we can’t.  I mean for one thing, I can’t stop looking at you.”

Dan smirks. “Oh yeah? What do you see?”

“You,” Phil says. “You and you and you.” The words devolve into a drunken mumble and Phil’s hands resume their spot along Dan’s spine to once more enfold him into a tightly clenched embrace. Although he’s careful not to squeeze too hard, his body conveys the incredible potential of strength within it as Dan quickly finds himself unable to move. His wry retort to Phil’s pseudo poeticness ends up stifled against his collarbone, but he’s not bothered by it, irrelevant as the comment suddenly is compared to the more interesting and deliberately gentle circle of arms around him. He knows exactly what Phil is trying to say besides. Phil could obviously see him, but he could also sense all the nuanced depths of a person’s character and mood to lend a new context of insight far beyond a human’s limited sensorial range, like being able to peer through to someone’s soul, transcending wonder to something like rapture so that from now on all things would be more than just the sum of their physical appearance and all first glances would instantly yield a wealth of information to make the world forever stunning and intense. Beyond their improved senses they now had a heightened perspective by which to affirm the best of what they had always seen in each other in ways that went beyond preternatural sight to dazzle and fascinate them both.

“You’re warm again.” Phil’s muffled observation resonates down the left side of Dan’s neck, eliciting a small contented shiver. “Before you were so cold, but you’re not now. Am I cold?”

“A bit.” Dan’s hands slide up Phil’s back, fall along his shoulder blades and settle there in the same mirrored embrace. “It’s more noticeable when you haven’t fed, but to other people, to humans, you’ll always feel cold anyway so we have to be careful.”

“Humans.” Phil draws back slightly to repeat the word as if pronouncing a phrase in a foreign language he’d never fully grasped. He looks distantly troubled by the implication of no longer being classified as human even as he appears fascinated and amused by it too.

“You alright?”

Phil simply nods and moves in to nose along Dan’s jaw, breathing in the enticing aroma of blood and the conjoined atmospheric scent of their emotions filling the room. “So warm.” His voice dips to a lower register that pulls another tingling shudder down the side of Dan’s neck all the way to the base of his spine. “Incorrigible heart.”

Dan blinks, unsure if he’d heard correctly. “What?”

“Just a dream I had a while back. There was a cat. Had a Geordie accent.”

Unsure of how best to respond Dan quickly decides to move the conversation along. “Are you…sure you’re alright?”

He notices Phil’s eyes have seeped to black again and he watches as Phil experimentally touches the tip of his tongue to the fangs crowding his mouth, poking at them in the same unabashed wonder as he’d once leaned forward to inspect the new fangs Dan had sported on his first night back home as a vampire.

“I’m fine, but I think I really am hungry actually- _ow_!” Phil recoils as the needle point edge of his right fang catches on his tongue.

“Yeah, they’re sharp, probably best not to go prodding at them unless you want to give yourself a piercing, even if it wouldn’t last long before it immediately healed up again.”

“I guess I couldn’t take a bit more– that is, you’ve probably given enough already,” Phil says. He stares intently at Dan’s throat and his fangs appear to grow a fraction longer in Pavlovian expectation, stimulated in part by the tiny red dot of blood on his tongue.

“Sorry, your local blood bank is closed for the night. No more withdrawals allowed.” Dan raises an eyebrow. “But I can get something ready from the fridge for both of us if you let me.”

It’s only after saying it that Phil seems to realize he’s pinioned Dan in his arms and with some reluctance, slowly releases his grip. Dan’s also hesitant to leave the comfortable nest of his rumpled duvet, but he knows the hunger would only continue to grow in both of them, coalescing past the point of tolerable ache to a starving frenzy and though he has faith in their self-control he’s not keen on putting those abilities to the test when they didn’t have to, just in case they risked featuring as tomorrow’s breaking news bulletin about two well-known YouTubers who’d gone on a rampage of drinking their neighbors’ blood in an unprecedented mental breakdown. There would be plenty of time afterwards for them to enjoy each other’s company here in the soft darkness of his bedroom where for the moment the gentle reprieve of evening lingers to keep them awake and the world outside continues to pass by in unimportant hushes of sound neither of them pays any attention to.

 _So here we are_ , Dan thinks. _We made it to the very end to start a new beginning and god knows what might happen next. But honestly? I can’t wait to find out. We are Dan and Phil and we made it here together and whatever eternity has in store for us, whatever adventures await, we’ll meet it together too._

It’s not the vast treasury of wealth they’d been gifted which inspires confidence, his motivations had never centered on venality, rather it’s the thought of everything they’d created, the memorable legacy of a singular universe he and Phil had spent the better part of seven years making together, most of it without the assurance of financial security to help their first tenuous efforts along, that grants him a sense of overwhelming pride and increased ambition to achieve more, to dream more; to exist and to love how he pleased with Phil at his side to make the effort that much more meaningful and worthwhile. Via the merit of their own courage and resolve they’d conquered the Night Court and a more debilitating committee of self-doubts, and as Yilmaz had said, this evidence of their accomplishments; their continued trust in each other despite impossible odds, despite being afraid and confronting their fears anyway, grants him something good and better to believe in, enough to make the daunting promise of eternity an incredible journey he can’t wait to begin.

He’s so focused on the enticing idea of transforming their lives according to the demands of their mutual happiness, so eager to simply thrive and to be, he’s not aware he’s staring off into the middle distance with the same unnerving intensity as Phil had stared at him before until Phil laughs and asks, “What is it with that look on your face?”

Dan abruptly shakes his head and resurfaces from the pleasant fog of reverie back to the present. “Sorry, lost in thought for a minute.”

“I can see that. You practically have smoke coming out of your ears. What are you thinking about?”

“You,” Dan says softly. “You and you and you.”

The answer is spontaneous and rife with unironic schmaltz, but for once Dan finds he doesn’t really care. It’s the best answer he can think of, the only one that fits to summarize his feelings at this exact moment. Phil doesn’t challenge or make fun of him, silently pleased as he looks to know Dan had valued his previous reply enough to repeat it with the same force of sincerity. As always, there was something incredibly comforting, not to mention liberating, in the knowledge that they could be as cheesy and sentimental as they liked in front of one another and not have to fear the threat of recrimination or hurtful criticism in return.

 _Because we’ve always found shelter in one another_ , Dan thinks, _we’ve always just been able to be who we are around each other, two nerds on the internet united by common interest and affection, and that’s made all the difference._

Dan’s certain it’s that one small but crucial detail which will continue to make a difference during the span of their immortality. It would be difficult if not impossible to keep from internalizing certain traumas and doubts throughout the years or to prevent himself from revisiting the enormity of all the metaphysical and ontological questions without answers to make him in turn question the foundations of his own existence, but Phil’s presence; that of his loved ones and newfound friends, along with his own self-assurance, provides a viable buffer against the encroaching tug of loneliness and fear. In Phil he not only sees a mark of unrivaled kinship and depth of affection he’d never be able to name or replace, he also sees a better mirror image of himself, one that rivals the contrived illusion Makhai had shown him. He embraces it without question, this version of himself who in Phil’s eyes was already clever, eloquent and kind- both strong enough and capable enough to weather whatever storms might follow, be they metaphorical or as literal as the one which had just swept past London. The world might not be static and the inevitability of change might be unavoidable, but the one thing he hoped would never change was the way Phil looked at him, the way he ‘saw’ him and the way Phil continued to be the clever, vibrant and brave person who would always hold the other half of Dan’s heart the way Manchester and London would always hold the remainder; the way people always said home was where the heart is; the way Phil embodied both from the beginning before Dan was even aware of it.

From a snug high-rise apartment in Manchester with its accommodating breakfast bar and sprawling skyline views to a multi-level flat in London with its memorable antique piano and wicker framed bed; from grainy laptop cameras to Radio 1 features; from a cat whiskered Q&A to an annual tradition’s iconic acronym; from human to vampire; from this present moment to whatever might follow- in the undemanding stillness of his bedroom Dan looks back on a prosperity of memories, the sum of which rival the worth of all the properties and bank accounts listed in the folders laying for the moment forgotten on top of his desk. They trace intersecting latitudes of coincidence and bliss to create a bird’s eye perspective of a life he doesn’t regret having lived.

Phil silently beckons to him again and despite the persistent ache of hunger Dan gratefully settles once more between his arms and they lean against the headboard, foreheads pressed together, listening to the quiet, slow rhythm of their hearts beating in tandem.

Outside, the rain drizzles against the window in the same unhurried pulse and all of London seems to, for one brief miraculous moment in time, flow in accordance to the unheard heartbeat of the two men who had come to call this busy metropolis of diverse boroughs, gritty traffic and sea of lights their home. Only one figure out of the winding crowds of umbrella toting passerby flowing by the flat hears the muted thrum of their hearts and murmured conversation. She stands unnoticed on the rooftop of a building across the street with the hood of her black trench coat over her head. A strand of silver white hair falls across her forehead, damp with beads of rain, but she ignores it. Instead, she nods once to herself, as if confirming that all was well as she had expected it might be despite having made the trip over to see for herself on the slim off chance her intervention might be needed after all.  It wasn’t often she felt the obligation to help. Her motto had always been one of harsh self-sufficiency. Survival of the fittest without the undue influence of support or company had been the way she’d long been conditioned to measure strength, but recently events had shifted to make her reconsider this perspective. No living thing was made for a purely solitary existence; nothing was truly autonomous, even the turbulent variability of the ocean relied on the moon to move. Perhaps even creatures such as she, though governed by different laws of nature than those of human beings, were no different.

 _Perhaps there is a thin line between monsters and humans, what we become or are made to be_ , she thinks.  _And then of course perhaps what tips the scales depends on what we say and what we do, how much we live or how well we try, for ourselves and for others. Funny to think I should be the one to learn more from these two in the past few months than I ever had in all these centuries, but I suppose not even I am above learning new things._

Yilmaz watches the darkened windows of the flat, lost in thought but not so lost that she doesn’t hear the faint approach of footsteps behind her. She doesn’t turn around to address the person. She already knows who it is with the uncanny intuition of a parent able to sense their child’s presence in the room, though as she had once told Dan she had never been the maternal type. Then again, maybe this was something else she had been wrong about, she muses, maybe not even she was exempt from the pull of familial sentiment.

“Shouldn’t you be busy convalescing?”

The person pulls up short mid-stride at her question and the energy in the air above her head turns to one of sulky disappointment at having been caught out so quickly.

“Yeah, well, turns out cabin fever can afflict a person even when they’re holed up in an airy loft courtesy of their long absent sire,” Teague says. “Besides, I’ve already exhausted my Netflix queue. I needed to get out, stretch my legs and get a taste of that good old smog ridden, soggy London air. If I’d have spent any longer in that bed staring at the walls I’d have gone mad.”

“Yes, Lucy told me as much that you’d finally managed to give her the slip. I thought it wouldn’t be long before you tried.”

 Yilmaz finally turns around and looks at Teague with a knowing smile. The large hood of the dark jacket he wears is drawn up over his head, obscuring his face in shadows. Yilmaz knows if it wasn’t raining he would have still worn it up to keep his face concealed. Nine months spent recuperating had allowed him to heal well but not completely, evident by the wrinkled furrows of scars lining the backs of his hands like the ridges of canyons and mesas lining a topographical map. Out of self-conscious reflex he quickly shoves his hands in his pockets to conceal them and slowly continues to approach Yilmaz with a staggered limp evident in each step he takes. She’s impressed he’s able to walk at all. She’d barely managed to reach him in time when he’d fallen through the floor into the swirling mix of flames below. Her private avowal to play detached observer and nothing more that night had failed. She had realized it as soon as she had abandoned her role as tarot reader to the one who had called himself Kyle, who had left her by turns mystified and captivated by his incredible nerve and resilient will. The brief encounter had affected her enough to compel her to remain in the manor a while longer when she would have otherwise left.

When she had found Teague, Eris had been hooked fast onto his shoulders, her face frozen into a grotesque snarl as the skin bubbled and melted off her skull, and even in her death throes she had refused to let Teague go when Yilmaz had tried to yank him out of the fire. She had succeeded however, only after seizing Eris’s hooked hands and wrenching them off with a brittle snap of broken bones, finally allowing her to lift Teague up in her arms and race from the second floor just as the chandelier had plummeted through like a falling star to destroy every floor beneath its crashing descent. For someone who had eschewed offering help for so long she couldn’t say why she had been moved in that moment to rescue Teague, whether it had been out of rekindled compassion, innate responsibility or a spontaneous whim, but she had allowed impulse to guide her and now she couldn’t say she regretted it after the fact. She had carried him away, broken and burned, insensible save for the pained moans gurgling low from his throat, back to a secure haven where he could heal in peace. She had appointed Lucy to be his ersatz steward, charged with ensuring his safety, buying the blood he needed and reporting back to Yilmaz with updates on how he was coming along. Needless to say, Lucy had been frantic and more than a bit terrified at having to confess to Yilmaz between repeated pleas for forgiveness that Teague had suddenly left the protected loft for destinations unknown, but Yilmaz had soon reassured her there was nothing to be sorry for. She had not only expected Teague to leave, she had already known exactly where he would go. It seemed almost impossible that he wouldn’t immediately be pulled back into the orbit of these two unassuming, extraordinary people who had won both Teague’s confidence and his friendship, especially after he had fought so diligently to the point of death to protect them both.

Teague continues his painstaking approach to the raised brick lined edge of the roof, where he finally sits down and turns sideways to look towards the flat where his two friends were now occupied with the greater concern of hunger and their private jokes with each other.

“I gave Dan the statue as you requested by the way,” Yilmaz says.

“Thanks for that. Would have given it to him myself, but you know…Guess I should say thanks as well for saving my life and all.” Teague’s shadowed face turns to her and his head tilts to the side in a quizzical fashion. “That’s twice you’ve done that. Never figured you for the type to go out of their way to help someone.”

“Nor did I. Nice to know we can both be surprised after so much time.”

Teague nods. “Yeah, it is. Not to mention lucky. Before you swooped in from the nothing to save me I thought I was toast for a while back then. Literally.”

A reticent silence abruptly falls over him and he clears his throat, glancing back down at the street to idly watch the ebb and flow of cars tracing their way over the rain glossed blacktop, too embarrassed suddenly at not being able to find the way to best convey his gratitude. Yilmaz however understands and allows him a few minutes to recover.

“I never mentioned you were alive, also as you requested,” she says after another moment. “But will you tell them yourself?”

“Eventually. When I don’t resemble Deadpool’s cousin anymore.” Teague sighs and shakes his head. “Bad enough I wanted to visit Susan first, let her know I’m alright, but I think seeing me like this would be more of a shock to the system than she needs right now. Saw one of her mates outside the place she works at and I wanted to ask about her, see how she was getting on, but I was too tired to set about that cloak-and-dagger mind game footwork to make him not question why I wouldn’t come out of the shadows to talk.”

“Your Susan is a resilient one, just as strong as those two. I doubt she’d have been affected too deeply by what happened that night. If you’re afraid of what she might say when you finally reveal yourself to her, I imagine she’ll only be concerned with your wellbeing. Such is the way of people who genuinely care for one another.”

Teague says nothing again, but in the dense shroud of darkness under his hood Yilmaz suspects his face might be turning a shade of red.

She looks back at the windows of the flat where in the rooms beyond she could sense the atmosphere was alive with laughter and the fragrant attar she too had come to associate with that of love.  “Pretty fools, they keep on the windy side of care,” she says.

Teague’s head turns to her again. “Is that from something? Sounds familiar.”

“Only a paraphrased quote from Shakespeare, nothing more.”

“Huh. Really? I didn’t take you for a lover of Shakespeare. Thought you’d be all over the Greek playwrights, what with you liking old mythology and all.”

“It’s true. I was a curate of theatre long before you were even born. I walked in the old pantheons alongside Euripides and Seneca. I followed the old performances as they were brought to the streets and the stage, but though I will always be fond of them, after all this time the old Bard stands as my favourite.”

“Why not bring him into the blood then,” Teague says with a tone of playful sarcasm.

“How would you ever know if I did not?”

Teague pauses, apparently stunned at the idea of Shakespeare quietly living in secret as a vampire amongst London’s modern bustle, just as much of an enigma as a member of the undead as he had been as a human, but Yilmaz laughs and quickly waves away the idea before his spontaneous daydream can snowball out of control.

“Don’t worry, I don’t have him secreted away in a mansion penning new plays for my pleasure. He died a human as he lived. Some legacies go on to be immortalized without our intervention to be inherited by the future generations and perfected upon or to serve as lessons to be inspired by.”

“A bit like love,” Teague murmurs, his gaze fixed on the windows of the flat across the street.

“Yes, it is a bit like that. And why not? Everything about Shakespeare was about love in one fashion or another. Love to stoke motivation to achieve great things, love to move against slander and self-doubt to become something greater than expectation, be it that of other people or themselves; love that moves the sun and other stars.”

“Nah, that last part’s Dante right there.”

“Hmm, you’re right, but so it goes. Love as a powerful force to transcend immortality or explanation. It’s curious. I don’t claim to understand it even after a millennia of watching the ages pass from one to the next, but I think even if those two didn’t have the blood, their history would endure the same as those words Shakespeare wrote so long ago.”

“So, what will happen now?”

Yilmaz smiles. “Whatever they decide would like to happen. The story continues apart from the ending we know here, much the way their story began, away from our eyes and ears. I’m no augur to tell you how it continues. What they decide to reveal of their fates and their minds will be in their own time. Or never at all.”

Teague nods in agreement, as if he’d already suspected as much. “And you? What’s on your secret agenda then?”

“I have my own stories to tend to and you have your own business to mind again. Which is the entire city of London I suppose.”

“True enough. My prolonged holiday wasn’t all bad, but I’ve been itching to get back out there.” His head tilts up to take in the liminal horizon beyond the small block of houses and flats lined up in front of them. “Always something new to learn, always some strange adventure to be had. Never a dull moment, eternity.”

Yilmaz looks one last time at the soon to be vacant flat where two people were currently settled in the permanent home of a world they had created together, both of them at this very moment devising new adventures to embark on; each of them learning from one another in ways neither was aware of and in the process filling the rooms with the light of their presence and the aura of their love.

 _“_ Yes,” she replies in a low murmur. “With them around I believe that’s a promise.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little over 400,000 words later and Exogenesis Symphony is finally complete.  
> It's a bit of a relief to have finished it, as well as gratifying to know I was able to finish it at all. Thank you so much for your dedication in reading through this strange (very long) story I've written and thank you for all the kudos and comments I've been left.  
> There are a few comments I haven't replied to yet that I've noticed now on logging in which I promise to answer in the days ahead. There's been so much happening lately that I'm not exactly in the right place emotionally to reply to them as I want to at the moment. As it is, I might have spent a little longer on the epilogue to iron a few details out further, but the length seemed appropriate as is and if I didn't post it now I didn't know when I'd be able to again. 
> 
> I also have to note this is my last phanfiction. I think I'll always have little bursts of inspiration to imagine Dan and Phil inhabiting different storylines and scenarios- I had one the other day for a sci-fi plot featuring Phil as the main character centered around the idea behind false vacuum theory and simulation theory with Dan in a role of antagonist (at least initially)- but it's only a vague thought for one and for another, apart from needing to spend time on world building and characterisation, I think there's a point where I've exhausted most of what I wanted to say with this story. I also just want to enjoy their videos now without filtering them constantly through the lens of thinking about what details would fit best in a given scenario or piece of dialogue I'm writing.  
> Like I said, they will always be a source of incredible inspiration for me, but I think I want that inspiration to motivate me towards more original works than phanfiction, despite having enjoyed writing this even while struggling through certain aspects of it at the same time. I'm sure I'll still write that sci-fi story one day, with a character who shares Phil's personality, but it's something definitely on the backburner for now. As it is, I feel very relieved and content to have been able to finish this novel of a story and very grateful to have recieved the positive reception it has so far. I hope this epilogue offered a satisfying end to it all and once again, as always, a heartfelt thank you for reading and for coming on this long journey with me. 
> 
> Notes on the story:
> 
> Sneaking in a few notes here pertaining to the previous chapter that I couldn't include in the notes section before. For example, the mural on the ceiling of the Night Court's room was loosely based on the painting called ['fiesta de disfraces'](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/69acc4_89f187e46aa7458bbb3931614e683349.jpg_srz_980_471_85_22_0.50_1.20_0.00_jpg_srz) by Guillermo Lorca Garcia.
> 
> Another not so important detail, but sometimes I'll use music to help visualize a scene or a mood and for the entirety of the scene of the fire Dan inadvertently starts in the hallway up to the chandelier crashing to the floor into the aquarium below I used the song [Hellfire from the FFXV OST.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6TycTt7DzY) (the whole soundtrack is incredible honestly and a great source of inspiration to listen to while I'm writing..)
> 
> What Yilmaz says to Dan: "but I do know this for certain: something that two people who are in love create together against impossible odds, can hold them together...forever." is actually a quote taken from the movie, A Little Romance, which might be a little dated and contrived in some parts, but I found it one day on accident and thought it was overall pretty funny and charming. It also had a few memorable bits of dialogue, especially one the character Julius says at a pivotal moment in the film to the characters Daniel and Lauren: _"What are legends anyway but stories about ordinary people doing extraordinary things? Of course, it takes courage and imagination... not everybody has that. I may be an old fraud Daniel, but I do know this: something that two people who are in love create together against impossible odds, can hold them together forever."_
> 
> Yilmaz's other comment, "pretty fools, they keep on the windy side of care" is paraphrased from Beatrice's line in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.
> 
> On writing about Dan's hometown I find I'll sometimes use Berkshire/Reading/Wokingham interchangeably as I get confused of which exactly has more significance, the same way writing about New York isn't just the city it's also the borough and then it's which part of the borough to give a multitude of different things a resident identifies as part of the the experience of being a New Yorker so I never really know in Dan's case which is appropriate to use, whether the county or the town, so I apologize if those parts are a bit jarring to read because of that.


End file.
